laws of Media THE NEW SCIENCE

Marshall and Eric

McLUHAN

1

University of Toronto Press

Toronto Buffalo London

Contents

Preface vii

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 PROTEUS B O U N D : The Genesis of Visual Space 13

PROTEUS B O U N D : Visual Space in Use 22

PROTEUS U N B O U N D : Pre-Euclidean Acoustic Space 32

PROTEUS U N B O U N D : Post-Euclidean Acoustic Space -

The Twentieth Century 39

Chapter 2 CULTURE AND C O M M U N I C A T I O N . The Two Hemi­

spheres 67

Chapter 3 LAWS OF MED IA 93

Chapter 4 TETRADS 129

Chapter 5 MEDIA POETICS 215

Bibliography 241

Index of Tetrads 251

Preface

Before you have gone very far in This book, you will have found many

familiar themes and topics. Be assured: this is not just a rehashing of old

fare dished up between new covers, but is genuinely new food for thought

and meditation.

This study began when the publisher asked my father to consider

revising Understanding Media for a second edition. When he decided to

start on a book, my father began by setting up some file folders - a dozen or

two - and popping notes into them as fast as observations or discoveries,

large or small, occurred to him. Often the notes would be on backs of

envelopes or on scraps of paper and in his own special shorthand,

sometimes a wri t ten or dictated paragraph or two, sometimes an

advertisement or press clipping, sometimes just a passage, photocopied

from a book, with notes in the margin, or even a copy of a letter just sent off

to someone, for he would frequently use the letter as a conversational

opportunity to develop or 'talk out' an idea in the hope that his correspon­

dent would fire back some further ideas or criticism. We began with some

thirty or so folders, one for each chapter of Understanding Medtar and

added a number for the new technologies that had appeared in the interim,

such as computers, video recorders, and cable TV. Simultaneously we

began to review all the criticisms of UM that might be helpful in revising it,

and found they were of two kinds - matters of fact (e.g., Jit was 1830, not

VIM Preface

1842') and what you might call matters of frustration The latter category

was by far The largest and though voiced in dozens of ways - by serious

readers who claimed the book 'difficult' or impossible To read' or who

objecTed to The style or organization - seemed to form a chorus of 'that's all

very well for you, but it's NOT scient i f ic'

Of course, there was rigour and science in it aplenty, but not convention­

al science. How then could we reconcile the Two: satisfy the one without

subverting the other? There began the search that led To The present book

The style of UM had been deliberately chosen for its abrasive and

discontinuous characier, and was forged over many redraftings li was

designed deliberately To provoke the reader, to jar the sensibilities into a

form of awareness that better complemenTed the subject-matter This is

poetic technique (science, if you will) of a high sort - satirizing the reader

directly as a means of training him. Now we were faced wi th the question

of how to make it 'scientif ic/ It took my father nearly two full years of

constant inquiry to find out 'what constitutes a scientific s ta tement ' He

asked everyone he encountered - colleagues, students, friends, associ­

ates, visitors Finally, one evening, he found the answer in Sir Karl Popper's

Objective Knowledge - that it was something stated in such a manner that

it could be disproved

That was it. The next day he began asking- What statements can we

make about media that anyone can TesT - prove or disprove - for h imself ?

What do all media have in common? What do they do?' We expected to

find a dozen or so such statements. By the first afternoon we had located

three with relatively little difficulty - all present in UM. First, extension, as

an 'extension of man' (the subtitle), every Technology extends or amplifies

some organ or faculty of the user. Th^ i , the attendant 'closure' because

there is equilibrium in sensibility, when one area of experience is

heightened or intensified, another is diminished or numbed. Feverish

search: Do they hold in every case? - Yes. Can anyone, anywhere, any

time, verify them by direct observation? - Yes A couple of hours later, a

third, wi th a chapter to itself in UM ('Reversal of The Overheated Medium ):

every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics.

(His most recent book, Take Today, was built around reversals.) Again, in

every case? - Yes And there, to our surprise, matters rested for about

three weeks; then the fourth appeared - retrieval It was quite a long t ime

before we realised that this Too had been The subject of a book. From Cliche

to Archetype N{ first we thought retrieval entaiied only the recasting of

whatever formed the content of the new form. That it does (the content of

any medium is an older medium), and considerably more. We found these

four... and no more. He spent the rest of his life looking for a fifth, if there be

one, and simulTaneously trying to find a single case in which one of the first

four doesn't apply.

ix Preface

Tentatively, thenH these became the first 'Media Laws ' Certainly, tt was

not what was expected - or wanted - by way of 'revisions 1 And that was

just as well, for much was yet to come. The study of the senses and of the

ways in which media extend and modify sensibility needed systematic

attention. Accordingly, we embarked on a full-scale study of visual and

acoustic spaces and their development by alphabetic and by eiectnc

technologies. It quickly expanded to more than 150 pages and only with the

greatest difficulty was condensed to its present size, here included as

chapter 1.1 won't claim that the study is now complete, but surely this is at

least a good beginning. There are still all the other senses to consider, and

their interpénétrations, for what happens to one affects each of the others

Gradually, as we searched for the fifth law, other discoveries and

implications began to emerge. The single largest of these was that of an

inner harmony among the four laws - that there are pairs of ratios among

them - and of the relation between that and metaphor. All the while, my

father was exhorting colleagues, visitors, and students - especially those

at his Monday-night meetings at the Centre for Culture and Technology - to

use the four laws to explore media, and to test the laws. Suddenly (I forget

exactly when or wi th whom) we learned that they applied to more than

what is conventionally called media: they were applicable to the products

of all human endeavour, and also to the endeavour itself 1 One colleague

at the university tried them on remedies for cancer, and found they

worked. With another, my father tried business procedures; wi th another,

Newton's laws of motion. They worked! The floodgates burst.

There were weeks and months heady wi th discovery and excitement.

Manuscripts of parts of this book underwent several drafts and began to

circulate among friends and colleagues for comment. Finding the link to

metaphor led to one of the farthest-reaching realizations, which itself tied

directly back to the subtitle of UM, 'the extensions of man.' Utterings are

outerings (extensions), so media are not as words, they actually are words,

and we had stumbled upon the key to their verbal structure. That is,

providing that the number of dimensions, or 'laws,' remained at four. Back

we went to eliminate one or to find a f i f th; forward we went into the

language of media. With the help of a grant to my father f rom SSHRC, I was

able to devote myself full t ime to assisting him during one crucial year

(1979) when we extended the application of the laws to the arts and

sciences. We found that everything man makes and does, every proce­

dure, every style, every artefact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick,

gadget, theory, technology - every product of human effort - manifested

the same four dimensions.

I don't consider it any exaggeration to say that confirming and detailing

this tie, between speech and artefacts, constitutes the single biggest

intellectual discovery not only of our t ime, but of at least the last couple of

x Preface

centuries. Yet the four laws are dazzlingly simple They must have the most

profound significance for the arts and the sciences, and not simply because

they erase the distinction between them They also provide both wi th a

common set of tools for forgrng ahead and backward - much the same

thing in any case - for constantly mining and revitalizing the tradition each

has, and for using each other as resources As we show (and as anyone can

test), the laws apply only to human utterances and artefacts: they reveal

nothing about animal products, such as webs or dams or nests, except

perhaps thereby confirming the ancient observation that it is chiefly speech

that makes us human and distinct f rom the rest of creation.

Many times over the years we worked on this book my father would

refer to the works of Bacon or Vico r rather as one would consult colleagues

He knew them much better Than 1 do, who learned all I know of them from

htm. He realized that they and other grammar/ans had been steering

courses parallel to his (or vice versa), bringing the tools of literary training to

bear on understanding the world and our part in it Several t imes a year he

would return to Francis Bacon's doctrine of the four Idols as holding a key to

the bias of communication - the forms of blindness imposed by media. It

was much the same with Vico, who, whi le ploughing away at etymology

and interpretation, was quite conscious of the forms of bias of sensibility,

as revealed in the language. Vico had his 'fours' as well - grammarians

(interpreters and etymologists) are intensely sensitive to patterns and

resonances Of course, when the four media laws appeared, we quickly

reviewed the Idols again to see if they showed the same pattern, hoping for

quick confirmation, as it were, f rom another quarter But our four seemed

to be new, and only loosely related even to the classic 'big fours,' the levels

of exegesis and the four causes Independent confirmation is always

rewarding to have For many years, for example, when my father made

some large discovery about media or about sensibility he would pop open

Finnegans Wake and within a few pages (seldom more than three or four)

find that Joyce had been there before him and had gone both farther and

faster, and infallibly because navigating by The lines of force in The

language Joyce usually f lew in style where Vico and the rest of us could no

more than walk or jog, St/IJ; this time, no independent conf i rms/on Jother

than Joyce - but that's another book). My father died before we could work

out in detail how his new discoveries related to the labours of Vico and

Bacon. He knew the relations were there, and his intuitions had never

played him false. It fell to me to do the tidying-up and to ready the book for

the press.

The key to the whole business is sensibility, as the serious poets and

artists (and grammarians) have always maintained. Vico in particular

Targeted 'the modification of our own human minds' as the crucial area,

while he cast about for a way to read and wr i te the 'mental dictionary ' Then

xi Preface

the relation between Bacon's Idols and Vice's axioms surfaced - bias of

perception - and the job was near done. Bacon called his book the Novum

Organum (or Novum Organon, as a swat at Aristotle's followers), the New

Science; Vice called his the Science Nuova. the New Science; I have

subtitled ours The New Science. On reflection, I am tempted to make that

the title and Laws of Media the subtitle, for it should stand as volume three

of a work begun by Sir Francis Bacon and carried forward a century later by

Giambattista Vico. As we go to press, I am sorely tempted to use Bacon's

own Preface as ours and to scrap these maunderings: in fact, were my

father here, I'm inclined to think that's exactly what he would do.

As you read, you wil l notice that each chapter uses a different style. This

is deliberate and the result of a decision to suit the style as much as

possible to the matter. So, the first chapter is kaleidoscopic because the

matter is compressed and the subject, the senses, a complex equilibrium.

Chapter 2 is relatively breezy, and it and 3 return closer to narrative. Chapter

4 moves towards poetry, the tetrads being in a sort of stanza-form

surrounded by glosses. To the charges that some are pretty lame, or that

some work better than others, we can only plead, 'It's new to us too,' and

invite you to help us improve them where you can. When my father died,

the Introduction and last chapter were mere sketches, a few pages each. I

have worked them up from our notes and added a few rhetorical items to

the end that were implied in those notes and in the discussions that gave

rise to them.

The five chapters also form a mosaic of approaches to a single theme. As

you view and review them, please mine them for whatever you find useful,

and leave the rest. They are about the word - but they are far f rom the last

word.

Eric McLuhan

Toronto

8.8.88

Laws of Med

Introduction

Toute vue des choses qui n'est pas étrange est fausse.

Valéry

... our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

To purify the dialect of the tribe

T S E M 'Unie Giddmg'

One fundamental discovery upon which this essay rests is that each of

man's artefacts is in fact a kind of word, a metaphor that translates

experience from one form into another. This essay offers in testable and

falsifiable form (the criteria of scientific laws] observations about the

structure and nature of things man makes and does; hence Laws in its title

A second fundamental discovery: It makes no difference whatever

whether one considers as artefacts or as media things of a tangible

'hardware' nature such as bowls and clubs or forks and spoons, or tools and

devices and engines, railways, spacecraft, radios, computers, and soon, or

things of a 'software' nature such as theories or laws of science,

philosophical systems, remedies or even the diseases in medicine, forms

or styles in painting or poetry or drama or music, and so on. All are equally

artefacts, all equally human, all equally susceptible to analysis, all equally

verbal in structure Laws of Media provides both the etymology and

exegesis of these words: it may wel l turn out that the language they

comprise has no syntax. So, the accustomed distinctions between arts and

sciences and between things and ideas, between physics and meta­

physics, are dissolved.

A New Science replaces the current Old Science of media and artefacts,

which is too narrow and too rigid, having drawn its techniques from the

abstract Method used since the Renaissance. It is a science of content and

4 Laws of Media

of messages only The study of human media and technologies mus ' begin

with their humanity and remain steeped in the study of the senses In 1620.

Francis Bacon pointed out in Aphorism xix of his Novum Organum that

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth

The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axions,

and from these principles, tnc truth of which it takes for settled and immov­

able proceeds to [jdcjment An<j ihts way now m tdshion The other

derives axioms from the senses and from particulars, rising b\ a gradual and

unbroken ascent, so that it arr-ves at the most general ax'oms last of all

Th,b is the true way, but JS vei untried

Barely a century later, in 1725, Giambattista Vico explained in his Sctenza

Nuova (§331): 'But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest

aniiquity. so remoïe from oui selves, there shjnes the eternal and never-

failing light of a truth beyond all question, that the world of civil society has

certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be

found within the modifications of our own human mind '

During one year, 1978-9, we undertook the first extended investigation of

the forms of space created by the eye and the ear. Visual space, as distinct

from acoustic space, is an artefact, a side-effect of using a phonetic

alphabet. The alphabet acts to intensify the operation of vision and to

suppress the operation of the other senses. We found that, to dale, no field

had managed any work on the subject, though it is fundamental save for

one article by F.M. Cornford, 'The Invention of Space.' As Bacon remarked,

as yet untrjed.

The transformation to visual space from acoustic space occurred ,n

ancient Greece What took several thousand years to complete has taken

us several decades to reverse 1 the West now bathes m the emotions of

postliteracy. During our research we found that there had been great

confusion for many centuries over certain matters crucial to an understand­

ing of acoustic space, for example, the natures of logos, of mimesis, and of

formal causality. This confusion flows directfy from the fact that a(f

commentary and research, from Aristotle onwards, was conducted by

persons, to one or another degree visually biased, who assumed visual

space to be the common-sense norm As a result, there arc at least two

forms or rather versions of mimesis and of logos and of formal cause ' One

of each has an oral structure, and the other a visual - wi th the former

conventionally regarded as a confused or tentative attempt to explain The

latter.

1 In researching the oral forrns - the true forms the work of F M Cornford. ir'ic Havelcc-and Pedro Lain-Enualgo has proved invaluable

5 Introduction

A few of the terms used in Laws of Media will be familiar to readers.

'Figure' and 'ground' entered Gestalt psychology from the work of Edgar

RubinH who about 1915 used those terms to discuss aspects of visual

perception. They have here been broadened to embrace the whole

structure of perception and of consciousness All situations comprise an

area of attention (figure) ar>d a very much larger area of inattention (ground)

The two continually coerce and play wi th each other across a common

outline or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously.

The shape of one conforms exactly to the shape of the other Figures rise

out of, and recede back into, ground, which is con-figurationaf and

comprises all other available figures at once. For example, at a lecture,

attention will shift from the speaker's words to his gestures, to the hum of

the lights or to street sounds, to the feel of the chair or to a memory or

association or smell Each new figure in turn displaces the others \nto

ground. Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the 'way of

seeing' as Flaubert called it. or the 'terms on which' a figure is perceived

The study of ground 'on its own terms' is virtually impossible; by definition

it is at any moment environmental and subliminal. The only possible

strategy for such study entails constructing an anti-environment: such is

the normal activity of the artist, the only person in our culture whose whole

business has been the retraining and updating of sensibility

In the order of things, ground comes first and the figures emerge later.

Coming events cast their shadows before them ' The ground of any

technology or artefact is both the situation that gives rise to it and the whole

environment (medium) of services and disservices that it brings into play

These environmental side-effects impose themselves willy-nilly as a new

form of culture. 'The medium is the message ' Once the old ground

becomes content of a new situation it appears to ordinary attention as

aesthetic figure. At the same t ime a new retrieval or nostalgia is born. The

business of the artist has been to report on the current status of ground by

exploring those forms of sensibility made available by each new mode of

culture long before the average man suspects that anything has changed.

He is constantly making 'raids on the inarticulate ' T S. Eliot pointed this out

in regard to Dante, that a great poet or serious artist should be able to

perceive or distinguish more clearly than ordinary men the forms and

objects within the range of ordinary experience and be able to make men

see and hear more at each end' of the spectrum of their sensibility than

they could ever notice wi thout his help.

The Divine ComGdy .. is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the

obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those

feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for

ttiem; and at the same time a reminder that the explorer beyond the

6 Laws of Media

frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to

hjs f&llow-cilizens if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realises

with which they are already acquainted. (To Cnltcize the Cntic, 134)

Serious artists are the 'antennae of the race '

Audile and tactile spaces are inseparable In the space created by these

senses - each sense and each configuration of senses creates a unique

form of space - figure and ground are in dynamic equilibrium, each exerting

pressure on the other across the interval separating them. Intervals,

therefore, are resonant and not static. Resonance is the mode of acoustic

space, tactilitv \s the spdeeof the significant bounding line, of pressure, and

of the interval

When we touch something, we contact it and create an interaction with

it we don't connect wi th it, else the hand and the object would become

one. A 'static interval' is a contradiction in terms, that is, it is either a

misnamed connection or an 'empty' visual space. Jacques Lusseyran

remarked, of the awareness of tactility in blindness:

If I put my hand on the tabic without pressing it, I know the table wa r: tnere

but knew nothing about it To find out. my fingers nad to bear do AT. and

the amazing thing is thai the pressure was answered by the table at once

Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found

that they came to meet rne instead I have never had to go more than

halfway, and the universe became the accomplice of all my wishes

If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a dif­

ferent weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my

fingers which were heavy. I didn't even know whether I was touching it

or it was touching me As f became part of the apple, the apple became part

of me. And that was how f came to understand the existence of things

\And There Was Light. 27)

Lusseyran is acutely aware of the 'modifications of his own mind.' to use

Vico's phrase, engendered by even simple experience. Much more

profound and more subtle are the modifications of our minds and ways

of life by our complex media. In Laws of Media we can offer only a

discussion of visual and acoustic space, although the further study of our

other senses and a full report on each one is of the first importance

As soon as my hands came to life they put rn^ in a world where everything

was an exchange of pressures These pressures gathered together n

shapes, and eacb one of the shapes had meaning As a child I spent hours

leaning against obiects and letting them lean against me Any blind per­

son can tell you that this gesture, this exchange, gives him a satisfaction too

deep for words.

Touching the tomatoes m the garden, and reallv touching them, touching

7 Introduction

the walls of the house, the materials of the curtains or a clod of earth is

surely seeing Them as fully as eyes can see. But it is more than seeirg them,

it is Tuning in on Ihem and allowing the current they hold to connect with

one's own, like electricity To put it differently, this means an end of living in

front of things and a beginning of living with them. Never mind if the

word sounds shocking, for this is love

You cannot keep your hands from loving what they have really felt, mov­

ing continually, bearing down and finally detaching themselves, the last

perhaps the most significant motion of all. Little by little, my nands dis­

covered that objects were not rigidly bound within a mold. It was form tney

first came in contact with, form like a kernel. But around this kernel

objects branch out in all directions.

I could not touch the pear tree in the garden just by following the trunk

with my fingers, then the branches, then the leaves, one at a time. That

was only a beginning, for in the air, between the leaves, the pear tree stifl

continued, and I had to move my hands from branch to branch to feel the

currents running between them. {And There Was Light, 27-8)

His remarks in And There Was Light are the more valuable since he

articulates in unusual detail the activity of each of the senses and its

closure.

More of the foundation of this New Science consists of proper and

systematic procedure. We propose no underlying theory to attack or

defend, but rather a heuristic device, a set of four questions, which we call

a tetrad They can be asked (and the answers checked) by anyone,

anywhere, at any time, about any human artefact. The tetrad was found by

asking, 'What general, verifiable (that is, testable) statements can be made

about all media? 1 We were surprised to find only four, here posed as

questions:

- What does it enhance or intensify?

• What does it render obsolete or displace?

• What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?

• What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?

Over more than twelve years of constant investigation, alone and with

the help of colleagues, we have been unable to find a fifth question that

applies to all media or to locate a single instance in which one of the four is

clearly absent or irrelevant. We issue this challenge to the reader: Can you

find a fifth question that applies in all, or in even a significant many,

instances? Can you locate an instance in which one of the four questions

does not apply?

Your answer is of the first importance as it determines the kind of our

8 Laws of Media

science. If one question is eliminated, if the tetrad is reduced to a triad,

then, as will be discussed, we have merely Old Science tricked out in new

clothes, not formal but efficient cause, and familiar Method If five

questions apply, we are in other, but again new, territory. The 'four' pattern

has a special resonance and relation to language Whatever the outcome,

once the number of laws is known - and it will be four - then we can be

certain that every human artefact wil l occasion exactly those transforma­

tions. Moreover, this fulfils one of the two great criteria demanded of any

law of science: Can it be verified and tested? Does it allow prediction?

Simply knowing in advance which transformations to expect, knowing

where and how to look, lets you predict the effects of any new device or

technique before they actually appear in t ime and experience.

Various aspects of the tetrad have, unknowingly, formed parts of our earlier

studies, collaborative as wel l as private. Take Today The Executive as

Drop-out (with Barrington Nevitt) revolves around three reversals, f rom

hardware to software, f rom job-holding to role-playing, and from centralism

to decentralism, in patterns of management and of corporate culture

'Reversal of the Overheated Medium' in Understanding Media examines

the tendency of any situation to flip into a complementary pattern when

subjected to extreme pressure The same book presented the themes of

media as being extensions of limbs and organs and senses (a kind of

enhancement) wi th profound reciprocal effects on the user.

Enhancements (extensions) and reversals are fundamental to War and

Peace in the Giobal Village and to The Mechanical Bride and Culture Is Our

Business. The Bride examtnes advertising before TV had hit North America,

CB after The Gutenberg Galaxy spells out in detail, as it were, one chapter

of the later Understanding Media: the like needs to be done for each of the

others. But the Galaxy primarily reports on the ascendancy of vision over

the other senses. Through the Vanishing Point. Space in Poetry and in

Painting (with Harley Parker) takes the study of the senses to their home

ground - the arts - and demonstrates how to use aphorism, probe, and

juxtaposition as study techniques.

Another approach is tried (with Dick Schoeck) in Voices of Literature.

That indispensable tool, figure/ground (and interval, for transformation)

analysis, appears in various later works, such as Take Today and City as

Classroom (with Kathryn Hutchon). The two laws of obsolescence and

retrieval - the whole complex retrieval and renewal process - formed the

basis of the study (with Wilfrid Watson) From Cliché to Archetype.

Conventional - Old - science, entirely dominated by visual bias, cannot

get a foothold in these areas This New Science is at once a synthesis and a

leap into radically new territory. We subjoin it to the Novum Organum of

9 Introduction

Bacon and the Scienza NuovaoiX'tco and to the long tradition of which they

form a pan

Having gleefully scrapped our traditions in headlong pursuit of the demon

of progress, now that we Westerners embrace postliteracy we find no

roots or resonance in alphabetic culture Prior to literacy, the job of

transmitting the accumulated knowledge of the culture was given the

poets: Homer's thad and Odyssey are meticulously encoded encyclo­

pedias ot the arts, manners, sciences, and mores of his Greece After

writing, the logos was smashed and the oral establishment drowned m a

sea of ink. Fragments of the old system were soon retrieved and recast in

the pattern that became the invium and quadrivium, or 'seven liberal arts. 1

The trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; the quadrivium,

arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. The trivium is our concern: all

three of its elements are arts and sciences of language.

Rhetoric concerns speech its ground-work is transforming audiences

Grammar (Greek for 'literature') concerns the interpretation of wri t ten texts

and the ground-patterns in words, etymology Dialectic specializes in the

word as thought, and in the content of words and of thought, and m

systems of right thinking Having no inherent ground, dialectic is abstract

and co-opts rhetoric and grammar as a sort of external ground. It comprises

two activities, logic and philosophy, and is the fountamhead of Method and

Old Science. The natural affinity between rhetoric and grammar springs in

part from each having both figure and ground elements, and in part f rom

both concerning words as presented to the exterior senses in writ ing and

speech Grammatical commentary on and interpretation of texts, first of

the poets and later of the Christian scriptures, was ever regarded as a

cumulative and collaborative enterprise, so the tradition of learning (the

transiatio studtt) formed as a deliberate offshoot (The natural complemen­

tarity of scripture and tradition remains vital, for example, in the Catholic

church as the twin sources of revelation. Each serves as ground for the

other.)

Christian grammarians found a congenial figure, ground interplay between

scripture and nature (Latin for 'about to be born') m Genesis where the

creation is presented as a divine speech. Accordingly, they bent their

efforts to developing parallel techniques for interpreting the ' two Books.'

which they regarded as fully complementary, as warp and woof Equally

interwoven in picking out the details were the tw in sciences of writ ing and

speech, grammar and rhetoric In fact, their alliance had begun well before

Christianity: it persisted unbroken for some two thousand years. (In all this,

the sister science, dialectic, stands a bit to one side.)

The alliance was further cemented in language Rome had no single

10 Laws of Media

word to translate the Greek term for word or utterance, 'logos'; instead, it

used the phrase 'ratio atque oratio' (roughly, reason and speech). The

phrase provided a basis for the pat formula for the ideal man of learning as

one possessed of 'wisdom' (master of grammatical tradition and technique)

'and eloquence.' The ideal survives, vigorous as ever, in our t ime: T,S. Eliot

used it to discuss 'The Importance of Mr. Pound. 1

Because of their conservative attachment to tradition, grammarians and

rhetoricians were ever styled 'Ancients,' whi le dialecticians, who in

each age propose marvellous new systems and methods for organizing

knowledge and thought and endeavour, were styled 'Moderns.' The

proverbial rivalry between the two camps and their intellectual wars

continue apace today, albeit largely unknown to the combatants. With

Laws of Media we launch a fresh campaign in the war, against the futility of

deploying the science of the Moderns of recent decades and centuries to

deal with matters of media, as distinct from messages. Now although both

Vicoand Bacon, the two other generals in the field, are universally and quite

ironically accounted philosophers, both are thoroughgoing Ancients. Vico

was a professor of rhetoric, his Scienza Nuova employes etymology and

exegesis and mobilizes the full canon of traditional 'poetic wisdom / The full

title of Bacon's sally is The New Organon; or. True Directions concerning

the Interpretation of Nature.

We mention these matters for purposes of orientation. Where dialectic

is inevitably theoretical, grammar and rhetoric are always empirical first. A

complete history of the three arts together does not exist and is badly

needed, for all three are reasserting themselves now, at the close of the

second millennium, as never before. With a knowledge of the trivium, for

example, it is fairly easy to see why much of modern linguistics and

semiotics, as presently constituted, will not succeed. Or to see the root

problem of phenomenology, namely that it is an all-out attempt by dialectic

2 Maurice tvlerleau-Ponty has put the matter succinctly. 'A concrete philosophv s not a happy one.' he writes It cannot have ground and be abstract at tne same time: ' It must stick close to experience, and yet not limit iiselt to the empirical but restore to eacn experience the ontological cipher which marks it internally As ditficult as it is jnder inese conditions to imagine the future of philosophy, two things seem certa n it will never regain the conviction of holding the keys to nature or history in its concepts, and it w II nor renounce its radicalism, that search for presuppositions and foundations wnich nas produced the great philosophies' [Signs, tr. Richard C. McCleary, page 157) It would appear, then, that when ground is added to dialectic, to Old Science, if flips into qrammar. New Science Adding ground flips the concept approach into percepts, 'rorn the abstract contents alone to the Book of Nature as a whole Both grammar and d alectic are concerned with 'the word' in things1 dialectic with the word or ideal thought n the m nd, pure, before speech, grammar with the word in (miormingi or even as things about us outside the mmd and body The difference between tnem is exactly rhetorc. utterance, which thus belongs to grammar

11 Introduction

to invent - or turn itself into - grammar, to force some sort of ground to

surface.

A theoretical science has to begin wi th knowledge and theory; empirical

science, with ignorance and bias. The one is rooted in concepts, the other in

percepts. The first cannot succeed unless it has an apparatus for locating

and remedying flaws in reasoning, nor can the latter without a similar

apparatus to detect and compensate for sensory bias. So the one proceeds

by figure alone, the other by ground and figure. Francis Bacon noted this in

the preparatory study Of the Advancement of Learning: 1 For the mind of

man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of

things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it <s rather like

an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture ' Early in the New

Science he developed these notions as a foundation for a detailed theory of

communication - that is, of effects and of perceptual bias. It takes the form

of his four 'Idols,' which whoring after false gauds is strong red-herring

hauled across the path of right awareness. Vico, next to take up arms,

begins by reiterating and updating Bacon's Idols as his own first four

Axioms.^ Each is a form of blindness or msensitivity, personal or cultural, to

a part of the spectrum. Our science accounts for these and in some

measure compensates for them, by the tools of figure and ground, and the

opening discussion of the sensory bias imposed on us by our extensions

It would be arrogant to profess that we, going the same road as Vico and

Bacon and the Ancients, have produced something better, and to do so

would be to set up a rivalry between us that at best would make an

irrelevant distraction. Instead, as Bacon said in his preface to Novum

Organum, Jmy object being to open a new way for the understanding, a

way by [the Ancientsl tried and unknown - the case is altered; party zeal

and emulation are at an end; and I appear merely as a guide to point out the

road; an office of small authority, and depending more upon a kind of luck

than upon any ability or excellency. 1

3 Benedetto Croce first noted the parallels -n h:s Philosophy of Giambarusta V<co. tr RG Collingwood (pages 155 7) Donald Phil p Verene presents the parallels in his essay Vtco's Science of the imagination ipages 128 33j Tne first four axioms constitute the basis of Vico's elements and. says Vico, 'give us the basis for refuting all op-n uns mtherto held about the principles of human ty' (New Science, 163). 'These four axioms express a

theory of ignorance which we need in order to acquire a doctrine ot truth concerning the nature of humanity' (pages 128-9)

1 .. we might come to a better understanding of the world in which an organism

lives - in other words, the section of the world of which it partakes through its

sensory apparatus - by studying its sensory systems themselves and their

particular sensitivities.

Robert Rivlin and Karen Gravelle,

Deciphering the Senses

PROTEUS BOUND: 1

The Genesis of Visual Space

When the consonant was invented as a meaningless abstraction, vision

detached itself from the other senses and visual space began to form. By

means of the phonetic alphabet, the units of syllabaries could be analysed

into their 'components,' vowels and consonants. Of these, as Eric

Havelock observes in Origins of Western Literacy, The former, the vowel,

could exist by itself in language, as in exclamations, like "Ah " The latter,

the consonant, could not. It was therefore an abstraction, a non-sound, an

idea of the mind. The Greek system proceeded to isolate this non-sound

1 In (he Odyssey, Proteus is styled 'an ancient one o' the sea,' who herds the seals <nows

all things, and has the power of assuming dif'erent shapes n order to avoid being questioned Ovid [Metamorphosis, VIII 731 f f ) s ngs, 'men saw thee as a youin, now as a lion, now thou wast a raging boar, now a serpent whom men would fear to louch. now horns made thee a bull, often tnou couldst be a stone, often, again, appear as a tree, sometimes imitating flowing water thou wast a river, and sometimes the contrary of water, a flame ' When the senses dance together transformation is tne common-sense

mode ot experience; when vision reigns over the others the universe turns static

14 Laws of Med^a

and give it its own conceptual identity, in the form of what we call a

"consonant" 1 (page 43).

With the representation of the abstract consonant, then, began the

separation of the eye from the other senses and the separation of inner

from outer experience. 'What the Greeks d id/ Havelock insisted m

Prologue to Greek Literacy, 'was invent the idea that a sign could represent

a mere consonant, a sound, so to speak, which does not exist in nature but

only in " thought " ' (page 11) This invention came from pursuing the

analysis of the bare sounds of speech to the level of complete abstraction

The result was the invention of 'the first system in which in all cases one

and only one acoustic value was theoretically attachable to one given

shape' {Prologue, 12).

The basis of alphabetic abstraction is the phoneme, the irreducible

meaningless 'bit' of sound, which is 'translated' by a meaningless sign The

phoneme is the smallest 'sound unit' of speech, and it has no relation to

concepts or semantic meanings. If the consonant is a concept minus a

percept, the phoneme, a 'thing' perceived in special, fragmentary terms, is

a percept minus a concept Syllabaries preserved the relation between

percept (ground of experience) and concept (e g / p a / father or paw), wi th

the phoneme, the two are split apart. The phonemic principle is that there

are in each language a limited number of elemental types of speech

sounds, called phonemes, peculiar to that language; that all sounds

produced in the employment of the given language are referable to its set

of phonemes; that only its own phonemes are at all significant in the given

language' (Moms Swadesh, The Phonemic Principle,' 32)

With the phonetic alphabet, as distinct f rom other writ ing systems m

which meanings still adhered to the signs and symbols, the letters had to

be free of ambiguity This was accomplished both by one-to-one matchrng

of sign and sound, and by rendering the signs themselves inherently

meaningless:

The script was reduced to a gimmick; it had no intrinsic value in itself as a

script and this marked it off from ll previous systems. It was characterist c

of the alphabet that the names of the Greek letters borrowed from the

Phoenician, for the first time became meaningless alpha. tefa gamma,

etc , constitutes simply a nursery chant designed to imprint the mechan'caE

sounds of the letters, by using what is called the acrophonic principle, in

a fixed series on the child's brain, while simultaneously tightly correlating

them with his vision of a fixed series of shapes which he looks at as he

pronounces the acoustic values (Havelock, Origins. 46)

This immense feat of abstraction had at least three effects. In the first

place, whereas a syllabary presented the reader with miniature Gestalts -

ba, kaH and so on - the new alphabet rendered the atomistic sounds - b-a

15 Proteus Bound

and so on - as a series of marks that had no character whatever and no

meaning. A second direct effect of splitting the visual (sign) off f rom

interplay with the other senses (sounds and meanings) was that the

abstract system gave the user the power to transcribe any language into a

series of abstract, meaningless sounds. Thanks to its ability to identify the

abstract components of syllables, 'the sign-system used in the Greek

alphabet, provided in theory an instrument of unique efficiency for

transcribing any language, and in practice one of peculiar efficiency for

transcribing the Greek language, a tongue in which the vocalic component

of a syllable was enlarged in comparison with the usage of Semitic

tongues, and which therefore encouraged a more ready identification of

the difference between a vowel and its consonantal accompaniment'

(Havelock, Prologue, 12)

By phonemic transformation into visual terms,

the alphabet became a universal, abstract static

container of meaning/ess sounds.

A third, and perhaps most significant, effect of the alphabet derives from its

direct and regular use of the subconscious by intenorization: The acoustic

efficiency of the script had a result which was psychological: once it was

learned you did not have to think about it. Though a visible thing, a series of

marks, it ceased to interpose itself as an object of thought between the

reader and his recollection of the spoken tongue 1 (Havelock, Onginsl 46).

The formal structure of visual space involves the suppression (intenonz-

ing by means of the subconscious) of all ground as a guarantee of abstract,

static uniformity. When the visible letter 'ceased to interpose itself as an

object of thought,' it too became a (suppressed and subliminal) percept

minus a concept. A correlative effect of the alphabet on the reader, in

splitting apart percept and concept, was to lend to the concept a similar

independence, making it a figure without a conscious ground.

As Robert Rivlin and Karen Gravelle remark, a primary function of our

sense of vision is to isolate a figure on its ground [Deciphering the Senses,

65). Cultural evidence suggests that this is the supreme property of vision

alone: no other sense, in high definition, that is, pressed to intensity of

operation, can suppress ground by isolating and detaching figures The

letters, as a result, came to be regarded as not only having no meaning but

also as having no properties. The alphabet served as the formal cause of

dialectic (logic and philosophy) and of visual (geometrical) space.

16 Laws of Media

The split between conscious and unconscious, as an effect of the

alphabet, is of crucial significance. It is a mimesis of the dissociation of

perceptual sensibilities (of vision from the other senses), which is inherent

in the form of the phonetrc alphabet.

For the preliterate, mimesis is not merely a mode of representation but

'the process whereby all men learn', it was a Technique cultivated by the

oral poets and rhetors and used by everybody for 'knowing.' via merging

knower and known. This understanding survives in the maxim 'the

cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known.' Using mimesis, the

'thing known' ceases to be an ob|ect of attention and becomes instead a

ground for the knower to put on It violates all the properties of the visual

order, allowing neither objectivity, nor detachment, nor any rational

uniformity of experience, which is why Plato was at pains in the Republic to

denounce its chief practitioners Under the spell of mimesis the knower

(hearer of a recitation) loses all relation to merely present persona, person,

and place and is transformed by and into what he perceives it is not simply

a matter of representation but rather one of putting on a completely new'

mode of being, whereby all possibility of objectivity and detachment of

figure from ground is discarded. Eric Havelock devotes a considerable

portion of Preface to Plato to this problem As he discovered, mimesis was

the oral bond by which the tribe cohered

YDU threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief

or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did the reciter to whom

you listened. Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achlles

had said or what the poet had said about him Such enormous powers of

poetic memorisation could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of

objectivity. Plato's target was indeed an educational procedure and a oriole

way of life. {Preface to Plato, 45)

Paradoxically, when the Greeks approached alphabetic technology

using their oral habit of mimesis, They put on its visual stress instead The

new visual ground completely alienated them from tribal culture; and so

there came to be an intense rivalry between the two modes of culture In

the Republic Plato vigorously attacked the control exercised through

mimesis by the oral establishment, for it

constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis,

to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of

cause and effect. That rs why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the

arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so

formidable. He is entering the lists against centuries of habituation in

J7 Proteus Bound

rhythmic memorised experience He asks of men that instead they should

examine this experience and rearrange it. that they should think about

what they say, instead of just saying it. And tney should separate them­

selves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should

become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it

and analyses it and evaluates it. instead of just 'imitating' it. {Preface to

Plato, 47)

Through mimesis of the alphabet, the Greeks absorbed visual dissocia­

tion of sensibilities in at least three forms, as we have seen. There is the

invention of the consonant as a phoneme, and its endowment wi th an

independent, abstract existence, which entails a split of inner (imaginative)

and outer (verbal) experience. And there is the sundering of the sign and the

phoneme, by virtue of both being made meaningless. Finally, there is the

aspect of translating everything into visual terms alone, on an abstract and

purely one-to-one matching basis. Much more than the writer, it is the

reader who, in the act of reading, puts on these dissociations as the basis of

replaying and re-cognizing:

When, therefore, it came to transcribing a given oral statement, the signs

employed, Through the abstract values attached to them, produced a

relatively clear, unambiguous and economical register of the exact sounds of

what had been said. The reader therefore-and it is in the act of reading rather

than writing that the secret of the alphabet subsists - the reader of any

transcription who had previously memorized the proper values could aca-jire

automatic and rapid 'recognition' - the Greek word for the act of reading -

of what was being said [Prologue, 13)

Since all reading was done aloud, this constitutes another significant

split between inner and outer experience.

Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its

fragmenting properties produced a new dominant

mode of perception and then of culture.

In 1936, F.fvl. Cornford published a paper, 'The Invention of Space 1 in

Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray. He noted that rational, visual space

was regarded as exotic and avant-garde by its newly literate Greek

18 Laws of Media

inventors. He overlooked the alphabet as the formal cause of the Greek

invention of space. Nevertheless he has tracked down the introduction of

abstract, non-experiential space as having been 'constructed by the

reasoning of Greek geometers and imposed by the atomists 1 'As

geometry developed, mathematicians were unconsciously led to postulate

the infinite space required for the construction of their geometrical f igures-

that space in which parallel straight lines can be produced "indefinitely"

without meeting or reverting to their starting-point In the sixth and fifth

centuries no distinction was yet drawn between the space demanded by

the theorems of geometry and the space which frames the physical

wo r l d / 2

The old acoustic 'common sense' of space continued as spherical,

multisensory, and multidimensional space until well into the first age of

alphabetic literacy, moreover, it provided the basis of considerable

opposition to the new abstract visual space of the atomists. 'Hence the

considerations which led mathematicians to recognize infinite space in

their science simultaneously led some physicists to recognize an unlimited

Void in nature. These were the atomists, whose system was the final

outcome of a tradition inspired by Pythagorean mathematics. The atomists

broke down the ancient boundaries of the universe and set before

mankind, for the first time, the abhorrent and really unimaginable picture of

a limitless Void' (Havelock, Origins, 44).

The most remarkable quality of the alphabet is its abstractness of

various kinds. From the patterns of separation, of sensibilities, and of figure

from ground, wi th the subsequent suppression of ground, comes the

character of stasis, one of the four features of visual space. When figure

and ground are in interplay, they are in dynamic relation, continually

modifying each other. Thus, stasis of the figures can only be achieved by

detaching them from their ground, and is the necessary result of detach­

ment. The sound and sign of the phonetic alphabet are in no dynamic

relation or interplay; one simply stands for the other. Both are abstracted

from all meaning or relation. Oral, resonant speech is broken into

irreducible (uniform) bits of meaningless sound, each connected to a sign

by arbitrary association, and by uniform orthography. By means of a

continuous linear sequence of signs, the bare sounds that compose speech

are re-presented and re-cognized through a single sense in isolation. From

this static, connected figure-detached-from-ground character, the alpha-

2 Comfort, 'The Invention of Space,' page 220 Havelock confirms this, n noting trial 'Atomism and the alphabet al'ke were theoretic constructs, manifestations o' a caoac ty forabstract analysis, an ability to translate ob|ects of perception nto mental entities, which seems to have been one of the hallmarks oi the way the Greek mind worked' lOngms,

page 44>

19 Proteus Bound

bet derives its other great power of abstraction, that of translating into itself

las an abstract, unmodified/unmodffying container) the sound-systems of

other languages.

The new (Euclidean) space was antithetic in

all respects to the established geocentric

spherical universe.

Cornford presents the abstract, infinite plane of the geometers as having

'no centre and no circumference. In its full abstraction, as conceived by the

mathematician, it was an immeasurable blank field, on which the mind

could describe all the perfect figures of geometry, but which has no

inherent shape of its own. For the physicist it was the frame of the material

universe, partly occupied by visible or tangible bodies, whose number and

extent were again without definite limit' (page 219) This is visual space in

all its aspects, an 'inner' conceptual reality and not an outer or empirical

one. Again, 'geometrical space was seen to be continuous, not a pattern of

empty gaps interrupted by solid things; it penetrates the solids that occupy

its single continuous medium. At the same time, the theorems of geometry

were seen to require that parallel straight lines shall travel on for ever

through this medium without meeting or returning upon themselves' (page

230).

The present essay had its beginning in an effort to locate the origin of

visual space as a Western paradigm. Its earliest expression seemed to be

manifested in the new Greek science of dialectic, and its influence was

responsible for the transition Cornford has labelled 'from religion to

philosophy/ That is, the alphabetic ground of new sensibility was mimed

and explored in several ways, one of the products of which was dialectic (as

begun by the pre-Socratic philosophers) and another the imposition of

'geometrical' visual space by the atomists Leucippus and Democritus,

The new metaphysical concerns wi th 'being' adopted the form of

abstract figures detached from the ground of immediate awareness.

Previously, with mimesis, 'being' had been immersed in the metamorphic

and Protean flux of everyone's daily experience With the new ground of

alphabetic awareness, objectivity and detachment became the rule

Mimesis was turned from a making process into representational match­

ing, and the old experience of being was retrieved on the new terms of

visual space, that is, as an abstract absolute.

20 Laws of Media

Formal logic and the logical syllogism

encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.

In contrast ïo the discontinuous aphoristic statements of the poets

and pre-5ocraiic philosophers, logic would seem the very paradigm of

connected thought. On closer inspection it appears that 'connection' is a

metaphor and is achieved by other means. In his History of Formai Logic,

I.M. Bochenski examines at length the 'Greek variety of logic.' and

presents sufficient evidence to show that 'connection' is in fact a metaphor

for containment (page 1 1 8 ) 1 The relation between elements of the

syllogism \§ termed connexive implication,' which means that the

consequent has to be implied in its antecedent 'Implied in' means 'folded

into 1 or 'enveloped by' so the 'connected logic' of the syllogism is actually

a matter of the Containment of the consequent in the antecedent

premisses. As Bochenski remarks, it is generally recognized 'that the

connected [proposition] is true when its consequent is potentially con­

tained m the antecedent' (page 119)

To pursue this a step further The Stoics defined an argument as a

system of premisses and conclusions'.

Premisses are propositions agreed upon for the proof of the conolusion,

the conclusion is the proposition proved from the premisses. E.g . in tne

following (argument]; 'if it is day. it is light; it is day; therefore it is light,' 'it

is light' is the conclusion, the other propositions are premisses

Some arguments are conclusive, others not conclusive They are con­

clusive when a connected proposition, beginning with the conjuction of ihe

premisses of the argument and ending with the conclusion, is true. E g.,

the argument mentioned above is conclusive, since from the conjunction of

its premisses 'if it is day, it is light' and 'it is day' there follows 'it is light'

in this connected proposition H if r it is day and if it is day. it is light: then it is

light ' Not conclusive are arguments not so constructed (page 122)

The connected proposition' is a sequence w i th a weU-defined beginning

and end; perhaps it is the strong sequential ly that provides the sense of

connectedness. As with the syllogism, truth is abstract, based on

3 Under the headmg 'Connexve Implication' he g ves the definition1 '20 09 Accord mo to Diodorus1 [his I proposition! is true "if (here are no atomic elerrents of things, [hen mere are atomic elements of things" out [hose who introduce connection say that aie connected •proposition! is sound when Tne contradictory of us consequent ir. incompaiiüle wilh ils antecedent So according lo there the atoresd d connected .proposil nnsl '20 071 are bad, bui the following is true "if it is day. it is day "

2 i Proteus Bound

matching, and the 'system' is informed by containment of the conclusion m

the premisses, or in the conjunction of the premisses. A(I of the features of

logical 'connection' and syllogistic reasoning exhibit and use only the

properties of visual space: space imagined as a neutral container, space

that is static, linear, continuous, and connected.

PROTEUS BOUND: Visual Space in Use

Cornford's theme in The Invention of Space' is that 'normal' space for the

Greeks was the preliterate or acoustic space, which has suddenly

re-emerged in our twentieth-century world under the aegis of Einstein and

relativity theory What we would call 'normal' or 'common-sense space'

remains visual and Euclidean for us in the twent ieth century, while the

avant-garde or Einsteinian space is acoustic or simultaneous once again.

Visual space is a man-made artefact, whereas acoustic space is a natural

environmental form. Visual space is space as created and perceived by the

eyes when they are abstracted or separated from the activity of the other

senses. With respect to its properties, this space is a continuous,

connected, homogeneous (uniform), and static container. Visual space is

man-made in the basic sense that it is abstracted from the interplay wi th

other senses and their specific modes. This abstraction occurs by the

agency of the phonetic alphabet alone: it does not occur in any culture

lacking the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet is the hidden ground of the

figure of visual space.

23 Proteus Bound

Any continuum inherently presents a situation that is a figure minus a

ground, such as a Euclidean straight line or plane. A continuum as such is

infinite and featureless. Actually, there can be no such thing as a

continuum. In nature there are no figures-minus-grounds. In fact, m nature

there are no figures at all - only a dynamic environmental mosaic that is

discontinuous and diverse.

To the scientist using visuai assumptions about

phenomena, nature appears as a collection of

figures whose variety and discontinuity can be

eliminated by means of abstraction.

Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail (12 February 1979), Walter Sullivan

discusses the recent interest in 'the first strong evidence for the existence

of gravity waves': 'The new findings created a sensation last month when

they were announced at an international conference of astrophysics in

Munich ... The direct detection of gravitational waves would be an historic

step toward fulfilling the dream of several generations of scientists who

have been seeking to bring all laws of nature - and the phenomena that

derive from them - into a comprehensive and rational framework.'

Connected, rational space presents to the scientist the possibility of linking

figures logically inside a connected framework, and in abstraction from any

natural ground. Rational space results from enclosing one space inside

another as a means of creating stasis. The Romans were the first to play

with enclosed architectural spaces - they put the arch inside the rectangle

In the second century, AD, in his Geographica, Ptolemy imposed a

rectilinear grid system - abstract, uniform, linear, homogeneous, geo­

metrical space - over his maps, thereby pushing aside the traditional

heterogeneity of the earth's surface.

Part of the confusion of Einsteinian four-dimensional space-time results

from the figure of abstract visual space suddenly acquiring a ground of

'relativity.' The visual figure now relates to the speed of light as its ground,

just as the acoustic figure relates to silence as its ground (as Max Picard

points out, in Silence). Three-dimensional Euclidean logic of the merely

visual variety is made obsolete by our return to the simultaneous and

resonant.

With the advent of Gutenberg technology the components and features

of visual space were greatly enhanced The intensification of visual space in

24 Laws of Media

the experience of the readers of the printed word appears closely in the

work of Descartes and Galileo and Hobhes and Locke.

By the time of Locke and Newton, explicit

consciousness of the concept of visual

space was current

The familiar Fssay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by John

Locke presents, fully elaborated, the long-held and still currently acceptable

perception of t ime and space. Locke worked in the shadow of Newton and

Descartes in a period famous for both its literacy and its rationalism.

Locke's idea of space as extension (which 'includes no solidity nor

resistance to The motion of body, as body does') led him to formulate the

idea of 'pure space.' fn comment ing on 'our idea of place/ he notes: 'We

can have no idea of the place of the universe, though we can of all the parts

of it; because beyond that, we have not the idea of any fixed, distinct,

particular beings, in reference to which we can imagine it to have any

relation of distance; but all beyond it is one uniform space or expansion,

wherein the mind finds no variety, no marks' [Essay, I: 136). That is, the

universe is a figure wi thout a ground. This happens to be one of the primary

characteristics of visual space, since it too, as an imaginary continuum, is a

figure without a ground. He goes on to locate the universe in terms of

container and contained, which is another feature of visual space alone:

'when one can find out and frame in his mind clearly and distinctly the place

of the universe, he wil l be able to tell us whether it moves or stands still in

the indistinguishable inane of infinite space: though ft be true that the word

place has somet imes a more confused sense and stands for that space

which any body takes up, and so the universe is in a place' [Essay, I: 138).

Among the characteristic qualities of visual space are that it is static and

unmodified by its 'contents/ and that it is a continuum. Locke remarks:

Secondly. The parts of pure space are ^separable one from The other, so

that the continuity cannot be separated, neither really nor mentally. For I

demand anyone to remove any part of it from another, with which it is

continued, even so much as m thought.

Thirdly, The parts of pure space are immovable, which follows from

their inseparability, motion being nothing but change of disiance between

any two things, but this cannot be between parts that are inseparable,

which, therefore, must needs be at perpetual rest one amongst another.

{Essay, I: 138)

25 Proteus Bound

The imagined stasis and continuity of abstract

space permits its infinitesimal divisibility.

Locke is careful to observe that I n both of these (viz expansion and

duration) the mind has this common idea of continued lengths, capable of

greater or less quantities: for a man has as clear an idea of the difference of

the length of an hour and a day, as of an inch and a foot 1

(Essay, I: 138}.

Besides being of infinite divisibility, space is infinite in extent:

But to return to our idea of space. If body be not supposed infinrtc (which

I think no one will affirm), I would ask whether, if GOD place a man at the

extremity of corporeal beings, he could not stretch his hand beyond his

body? If he could, then he would put his arm where there was before space

without body, and if he there spread his fingers, there would still be

space between them without body. If he could not stretch out his hand, t

must be because of some external hindrance (for we suppose him alive,

with such a power of moving the parts of his body that he hath now . j ; and

then I ask whether that which hinders his hand from moving outwards be

substance or accident, something or nothing? ... the argument is at least as

good that where nothing hinders (as beyond the utmost bounds of all

bodies), a body put into motion may move on, as where there is nothing

between, there two bodies must necessarily touch; for pure space

between is sufficient to take away the necessity of mutual contact, but bare

space in the way is not sufficient to stop motion The truth is, these men

must either own that they think body infinite, though they are loath to speak

it out, or else affirm that space is not body. For I would fain meet with

that thinking man that can in his thoughts set any bounds to space, more

than he can to duration, or by thinking hope to arrive at the end of either

[Essay,I: 141)

This last passage provides a prime example of Euclidean or 'geometric'

space. As F.M. Cornford points out (page 233), it is quite traditional, having

been used by Lucretius, and, earlier, byArchytas: ' If I am at the extremity of

the heaven of the fixed stars, can I stretch outwards my hand or staff? It is

absurd to suppose that I could not; and if I can, what is outside must be

either body or space. We may then in the same way get to the outside of

that again, and on on; and if there is always a new place to which the staff

may be held out, this clearly involves extension without limit' (Eudemus,

frag. 30),

Locke's idea of t ime is endowed with all the properties of visual space:

'Time in general is to duration as place to expansion': They are so much of

26 Laws of Media

those boundless oceans of eternity and immensity as is set out and

distinguished from the rest, as it were by landmarks; and so are made use

of to denote the position of finite real beings, in respect one to another, in

those uniform infinite oceans of duration and space' (Locke, Essay, I

161-2). Not only are both uniform and infinite, but also they are continuous

and infinitely divisible. As Locke points out, 'Every part of duration is

duration too, and every part of extension is extension, both of them capable

of addition or division in infinitum.'4

Time, like space, is for Locke abstract,

homogeneous, uniform, and a container

Time was visually recast as linear and continuous: ' But yet there is this

manifest difference between them: that the ideas of length which we have

of expansion, are turned every way, and so make figure, and breadth, and

thickness; but duration is but as it were the length of one straight line,

extended in infinitum, not capable of multiplicity, variation or figure; but is

one common measure of all existence whatsoever, wherein all things,

whilst they exist, equally partake' {Essay, 1. 166).

Locke was by no means the origrnator of the idea of visual space

as clear, distinct, and logical Two generations earlier, Descartes had

announced his 'geometrical method' or Mathesis Universalis as extend­

ing to every subject whatever. The critical survey of C M . Turbayne

approached the question of the disguises 'placed on the face of nature' by

the pervasive acceptance of visual space in the seventeenth century:

Consider the metaphor, or heap of metaphors, known as 'the geometrical

model' whose presence we can now detect in the systems of Descartes

and Newton Hallowed in science, it has been so constantly used in various

fields that it is now nothing but a disguise placed on the face of nature, a

disguise so complete and so ingeniously contrived by a succession of make­

up artists from Pythagoras through Euclid to Descartes, Newton, and

beyond, that most of us are fooled by it. Newton called it his 'Mathematical

Way,' and Descartes 'The Geometrical Method' or Mathesis Universalis.

But Descartes' is the best model because, of all the make-up artists, he was

most aware of what he was doing On the night of November 10, 1619.

4 Essay I: 165 A typical example of the way m which the assumptions of v sual space, in physics and cosmology, were transmuted to the Western European tradition occurs in Cicero's Academics as Varro expounds infinite divisibility and continuity m matter and in space (I. vn).

27 Proteus Bound

having experienced a moment of illumination. Descartes dreamed a dream,

which, after interpretation, enabled him to envisage the extension of the

geometrical model to every subject. All his subsequent work amounted to

presenting outlines of, and exercises in the use of, this model [The Myth

of Mefaphor, 66)

The 'geometrical model' (and the mechanist outlook) is built on the

properties of visual space, principally th<3t of detachment of figures through

ignoring or suppressing ground. The first property of the model is, as noted

in The Discourse on Method, deduction, as Euclid had used it. but now to

be extended beyond abstract geometry to all human knowledge 'Those

long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers are wont to

use to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led

me to fancy that everything that can call under human knowledge forms a

similar sequence' (Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor. 66)

The second property of The mode) is extension, which now comprises

the whole of the physical world. As Turbayne remarks, 'amazingly, this

property is to be treated as the defining property of the physical world, for

the latter is nothing but res extensa. Physics is geometry, or, in other

words, the object of abstract geometry, namely extension in length,

breadth, and depth, is the object of physics: "But I have only decided to

give up abstract geometry , in order to have more time to study another

kind of geometry which concerns itself with problems about the phenomena

of nature ... My physics are nothing but geomet ry" ' (page 67)

Descartes brought the physical world, as an

abstract machine, into line with

geometrical space.

As Turbayne notes, the inclusion of motion 'enables the first three

properties to define mechanics, making the geometrical model identical

with the machine model' (The Myth of Metaphor, 67; the three properties

are long chains, extension, action] Descartes wrote, I have hitherto

described this earth, and generally the whole visible world, as if it were

merely a machine in which there was nothing at all to consider except the

shapes and motions of its parts' (Principles IV; 118; Turbayne's italics).

The work of Locke provides an inventory of the attributes of visual

space A philosopher of the rational enlightenment, Locke developed ideas

of the spatial continuum that have persisted along wi th Newtonian

28 Laws of Media

concepts until the introduction of electric technology in the nineteenth

century. Ernest L. TuvesonH in The imagination as a Means of Grace,

examines the process whereby visual abstraction resulted in a mechanist

approach to cosmology and the intellect alike: 'Once the mind has been

absorbed into nature, it takes on characteristics of the natural wor ld; and

when the cosmic order appears as a marvelously and perfectly contrived

machine, each part working precisely wi th every other part, the mind too

must appear as natural and (to use a modern term which had to be invented

to express a new attitude) "no rma l " ' (page 46).

It was a perfectly natural step from this view to regarding 'absolute

space' as sharing some of the attributes of God:

The empty places of the solar system took on a sacred character. An ob­

scure country preacher, Ellis Bradshaw, in 1649 printed A Week-daies

Lecture, or Continued Sermon to wit, The Preaching of the Heavens, which

shows how great was the excitement over space mystique, even among

the relatively uneducated. Bradshaw, in his simple enthusiasm for 'place,'

'boundlesse, and unlimitabte extensive, vastly circumventing, even the

highest Heavens, beyond all thought, or imagination of man, or any fin-te

being, and that on every side,' anticipates the enthusiasm of Shaftes­

bury. (The imagination as a Means of Grace, 62)

This equation between visual space and God actually retrieves a

late-medieval image of God's working in the world, imagery drawn from the

new, arcane science of optics:

The propitious link between the mechanistic optical theories of the Arabs

and the eventual demonstrations of linear perspective by Brunelleschi and

Alberti was made possible by three thirteenth-century English monks with

close connections to the Franciscan order Robert Grosseteste (c. 1 .68¬

1253), Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292). and John Pecham 1c. 1235- 1292) Why

should the mathematical science of optics hold such fascination for those

faraway, northern men of the cloth? Bacon gives us the answer in his

own Opus Majus'

Since the infusion of grace is very clearly illustrated through the multi­

plication of light, it is in every way expedient that through the

corporeal multiplication of light there should be manifested to us the

properties of grace in the good, and the rejection of it in the wicked

For in the perfectly good the infusion of grace is compared to light

incident directly and perpendicularly, since they do not reflect from

them grace nor do they refract it from the straight course whsch

extends along the road of perfection in life But sinners, who are *n

mortal sin, reflect and repel from them the grace of God ...

29 Proteus Bound

In other words, optics s e e m e d the model by wh ich God spread His grace to

the world. To understand the physical l aws of opt ics meant that one

might gain insight into the very nature of God (S.Y. Edgerton, The Renais

sance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 7 4 - 5 ) 5

Because it is incorporeal, God's moral power (grace) seemed familiar to

a sensibility schooled in abstract space. Edgerton elaborates. 'Grosseteste

was first concerned wi th defining the nature of light. Since lux was created

by God on the First Day, he reasoned, this had to be the basic force for the

divine energizing of the universe Light was therefore synonymous with

God's grace, and Grosseteste then postulated that light was to the natural

world what abstract space was to geometry' (page 75 ) .

Gradually the idea and expression of abstract immensity became

synonymous with God himself. The Cambridge Platonist Henry Moore

elaborates: 'That the perpetual Observation of this infinite Amplitude and

Mensurability, which we cannot disimagine in our Phancy but will

necessarily be, maybe a more rude and obscure Notion offered to our Mind

of that necessary and self-existent Essence which the Idea of God does

with greater fulness and distinctness represent to us ... Whence, as I said

before, the Idea of God being such as it is, it will both justly and necessarily

cast this ruder notion of Space upon that Infinite and Eternal Spirit which is

God' (Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace, 66). His Neo-

Platonist approach proves very congenial to Sir Will iam Jones, the

orientalist, who represents God as the Being

. who through ev'ry part

Of space expanded and of endless time.

Beyond the stretch of lab'ring thought sublime,

Bad'st uproar into beauteous order start ..

{The imagination as a Means of Grace, 66)

Galileo's chief effect was to move man in his self-image from the centre of

the universe to the periphery. This was the main reason for the church's

5 Mr Edgerton notes 'Alhazen's lengthy optical Treatise was first printed n the West by

Frederick Risner in Optica rhessurus Alhazeni Arab's libn septem item Vtteiionis

Thuringopolon/s opncae libn decern [Basel, 1572) This work has been recently reissued

by the Hohnson Reprint Corporation (New York. 1972). Davd C Lmdberg, ed .

Alhazen's ingenious explanation of how the light rays pass into the eye, " make" their

image on the crystallmus, and then become refracted (all save the centric ray [the

apple ot The eye]} in the vitreous humor in order to pass the image upright to the optic

nerve and brain, was finally proven wrong by Kepler. Following the experiments by

Felix Platter, Kepler proved that the crystalline lens was not the seat of visual power but

merely a dioptric focusing agent of light rays upon the sensitive retina at the back of

The eye. In spite ot the fact that in Kepler's explanation the visual image in the eye

remains inverted, he proved that this is in fact the way we " s ee . " ' Samuel Y Edgerton, J r .

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 195.

30 Laws of Media

opposition to his disputation to The cardinals. What Tuveson regarded as

the 'great crisis of change from an anthropocentnc and geocentric

cosmology, with a supra natural theology, to the Newtonian world machine,

produced no great spiritual upheaval ' That this upheaval did not occur was

surely a direct result of the acceptance of the visual space continuum by all

groups alike. ' Immensity and eternity gave at least the illusion that

supreme values were to be found in the endless continuum of common­

place thoughts and petty, selfish purposes which came to constitute the

laissez-faire society. The natural sublime served to validate the actions of

li*e and thus took its place along wi th the idea of progress, as a

psychological prop of Western society' (The Imagination as a Means of

Grace, 67-8)

From the immense and the sublime, the natural

reversal was to meditation on ruins.

The Alps 'are nothing but great ruines: but such as show a certain

magnificence in Nature ' With the reversal f rom the admirauon of the

sublime and the immense into the contemplation of the magnificence of

confusion and disorder, the new sensibility of romanticism appears in

embryo Paradoxically, the world of rums brought into motion the tram of

ideas that a 'law of the imagination' is that by which 'an idea perceived of a

part of a thing recurs as the whole of it ' This 'law' brings us directly to the

world of the nrneteenth-century symbolists and the study of suggestions

and effects.

Once critics had turned their attention inward to the impact of rums or

desolation on the imagination, it was not difficult to take the further step of

separating subjective effects from the themes and content of art and

poetry It became possible to revisit the accepted masterpieces of classical

art for the specific purpose of experiencing their effects as if they were

previously unknown Addison observes, 'Reading the Iliad is tike traveling

through a country uninhabited, where the fancy is entertamed wnh a

thousand savage prospects of vast deserts, wide uncultivated marshes,

huge forests, misshapen rocks and precipices/ Although the Iliad had

become, in Addison's t ime, a 'romantic poem,' it was, as Tuveson points

out, available on these terms only after the subjective impressions derived

from a poem were completely dissociable from its content.

Paradoxically, it is in the visual space of Locke and Addison that mental

faculties and 'outer' space can be infinitely fragmentized Their visual

31 Proteus Bound

classical space, when pushed to the limit, yielded the wor ld of specrai

subjective impressions

Our intent in these pages has been to show visual space, as it w^ore, at

the peak of its form in the eighteenth century and to indicate how it was

generated as a side-eflecl of alphabetic technology Acoustic space as

known by pe^'terates (and many non-alphabetic cuhures). by contrast, is

presumably the natural mode of spatial awareness, for it was not the

side-effect of any technology. The next section examines the pre-Euclidean

sensibility of space, and in the concluding section of this chapter we will

examine the reappearance of that sensibility as a side-effect of electric

technology.

Something (hat happens according to a taw doesn't need a cause

R G. ColhngwofxJ

PROTEUS UNBOUND: Pre-Euclidean Acoustic Space

Visual space - Euclidean space - was introduced in ancienl Greece in the

teeth of considerable opposition. The persistent pre-Euclidean common

sense had to be overcome and transformed into the visual space of the

atomists and geometers So. medieval illustrative styles persisted even in

scientific manuals right Through the sixteenth century, 5 so too our

conventional Euclidean common sense has yet to catch up wi th the real it y

or the implications of relativity. The alphabetic revolution took centuries.

6 11 is interesting That most ol the Itafian artists djnng The IJIST half of =he U'eenlh cenu* y

did not suddenly adapt to I.near perspective, and the new art-science was never aopheri

either to scientific drawings or architectural models until The time ol Leonardo da Vino

(1452-1519) Rdtner am-usingly there was a propensity continu ng ncjhr th'ough the

siMleenlh century. io iliuslTale scientific mariuals with pictures w> spin-ve^. o* re^er^e

perspective, long after ine rules ot Brunellescni and AlberV had been acknowledged bv

artists generally ' Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. 24-5

33 Proteus Bound

Eric Havelock identifies a long period of 'proto literacy' which, in Athenian

society during the seventh and as far as the last decades of tne sixth

century BC r had only reached the condition of 'craft literacy.' It is normally

assumed that the alphabet filtered down from the upper classes to the

artisans, or conversely that the artisans were very educated types.

Havelock shows that the reverse is the case, 'that the alphabet's use did

not achieve what I may call cultural prestige for a very long time.' The

earliest alphabetic writ ing extant is on a pot dated between 750 and

690 BC. it is, he concludes, as Athens entered upon her fourth century that

her literate revolution was being accomplished

The change in perception brought about by the spread of the alphabet

provided the visual bias necessary to support the atomist revolution and

pushed aside the inclusive, audile-tactile orchestration of the senses.

Cornford observes that the introduction of visual space 'was still denied by

Aristotle; and his immense authority, fortified by ecclesiastical prejudice,

held atomism at bay for some t ime' (The Invention of Space/ 222).

Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space

is spherical and resonant

Acoustic space is a complete contrast to visual space in all of its properties,

which explains the wide refusal to adopt the new form. Visual space,

created by intensifying and separating that sense from interplay wi th the

others, is an infinite container, linear and continuous, homogeneous and

uniform. Acoustic space, always penetrated by tactility and other senses, is

spherical, discontinuous, non-homogeneous, resonant, and dynamic Visu­

al space is structured as static, abstract figure minus a ground, acoustic

space is a flux in which figure and ground rub against and transform each

other.

There is much confusion among early commentators and later scholars

about the various forms of space as wel l as other matters such as the

nature of mimesis and of the logos. Aristotle and others were working with

one foot İn each world, as it were, using the new forms of awareness but

trying to retain or update the ideas of the old oral culture. The atomists

proposed an infinite void, which was simply Euclidean space credited with

physical existence but carrying the old name. The atomists' excitement

over their discovery of visual space and their use of it as a technique of

invention of isolated figures was spotted by Francis Bacon as a seductive

distortion of true sensibility. He indicts 'the school of Leucippus and

34 Laws of Media

Democntus as compared wi th the other philosophies' for being 'so busied

with the particles that it hardly attends to the structure' and cites them as a

prime exemplum of 'Idols of the Cave' [Novum Organum, I: Ivn). To the

pre-Euclidean, sixth-century BC oral imagination, there was instead 'a

spherical universe called "the Heaven," a living creature, whose breath is

drawn in from the boundless air enveloping it outside. The important point

is that "the Void" is another name for this air or breath' (The Invention of

Space/ 223).

Another confusion arises, in our minds, accustomed to infinity, concern­

ing 'the boundless. 1 Boundlessness did not imply infinity, but rather the

absence of fences or boundaries. 'Boundless' had no implication of 'the

infinite and shapeless extent of mental Euclidean space or the Lucretian

Void . . On the contrary, it is frequently and specially used of circular or

spherical shape, because on the circumference of the circle or the sphere

there is no beginning or end, no boundary separating one part f rom another'

(The Invention of Space/ 226). The Void had none of the properties of

container and contained. Cornford observes that 'Anaximander described

his "boundless," encompassing the world, a s " the divine", and Empedocles

calls his universe "a rounded sphere altogether bound less/" 7

The pre-atomist mult/sensory void was an

animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval,

neither container nor contained - acoustic space

penetrated by tactility.

Aristotle, on a feature of Pythagorean cosmology, pointed out: 'The

Pythagoreans too asserted that Void exists and that it enters the Heaven

itself, which, as it were, breathes in f rom the boundless a sort of breath

which is at the same time the Void. This keeps things apart, as if it

constituted a sort of separation or distinction between things that are next

7 'Invention of Space.'227 C H Kahn comments 'As Corn'ord nas rightly u^ged the only

motive for such a theory is the alomist assumption o ( an infinite, indiscnm na'.e void, in

wnich one point is as good as another for the fortuitous concourse of bodies tnat mav

produce a world The apenon: " bo-undless" of Anaxirnander is of a different order, and his

world arises not by chance but, as far as we can tell, by a kind of orgarrc growth'

[Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, 51 and passim)

35 Proteus Unbound

to each o ther ' 0 It is not so much the elements as the intervals or

discontinuous residue between them that give form or configuration. 9

Within the Heaven, 'the function of the air or vacancy is to keep apart the

solid bodies we see and to give them room to move in' {'The Invention of

Space,' 223). There, space is constituted of resonant intervals, dynamic

relationships, and kinetic pressure We hear f rom all directions simultan­

eously; acoustic space has the structure of a sphere in which things create

Their own space and modify and coerce each other. Without visual stress

necessary to drive the other senses 'underground' into the subconscious,

their interrelatedness is constant.

The mode of cognition in acoustic or multisensory spaces is mimesis.

'The cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known/ while the eye is m

equal interplay with the other senses. There is no infinity: to the ear faculty,

the question is unintelligible. The essential structure of the old void is

kinetic and tactile, a matter of pressure and interval.

Parmenides conceived of the whole of being as 'complete on every side,

like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre in every

direction.' Cornford adds: 'We naturally ask, what is outside this finite

sphere of being? Parmenides does not raise that question; apparently it did

not occur to him that such a question could be asked' (pages 227-8). In

fact, 'at Parmenides' date, no one had seen any reason why there should be

an infinity of unoccupied space. It appears, then, that in these earliest

cosmologies the universe of being was finite and spherical, with no endless

stretch of emptiness beyond' (page 228).

The space of early Greek cosmology was

structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

The Greeks had two words for 'word' or 'utterance/ logos and mythos, of

which logos was much the older and more complex. As Havelock. in

8 Physics, IV. 6. 213b. 23 after Corrrord. ' Invention of Space,' 223 The obscur ty of this

commentary is largelv a resull of [he problerr posed Anstctle bv his own v sual bi^s when

trying TO report on ajdile-tactile awareness

9 Commenting on E'wm Panofs^y's essay 'Perspective as "Symbolic Form,"' Samuel

Edgerlon, Jr. notes that in antiouity 'space was understood by aM sts &s a discontinuous

residue between ob|ects rather than as sometning which transcends and un tes them

Such a conception allows a proper sensation of above, below, ahead beh nd, but never o - a

unified continuum such as today informs us about the relat ve distance between obiects in

perspective p-ctures' i The Renaissance Rediscover/ of Linear Perspective. 158i

36 Laws of Media

Preface to Plato, has shown, the spoken word, logos, functioned in oral

society as the principal technology both of communication and of fashion­

ing and transmitting the culture.

Logos was also related to formal cause, to the existential essence of

things. In this sense. Pedro Larn-Entra/go observes, ail things areas /t were

words, expressions

The logos of the philosophers, from Thales to Democntus, was used lo

declare what things 'are.' Moreover, it should be stated, with Zubin that

after Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus, the logos means that

which is understood and said rather than a mere saving or understanding, as

it had been up to then, and belongs therefore Fo the very structure of

being ... Things wilt be very different when the logos, as an 'nstrument of

human social intercourse, is principally u?ed to convince or persuade

others, or. as Zubin says, when the 'rs' o/ conversation becomes the 'is' of

things. [Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity. 87}

The logos in its double sense of word and reason (the Romans had to

translate it 'ratio et oratio') was considered by the prehterate Greeks as the

'highest and most specific' of the gifts of nature. By means of active

utterance, logos (speech), men could express what Things are as well as

exercise rhetorical power over other men. Farr words and lofty deeds are

the titles of social excellence in Homer. Before writ ing, logos was active

and metamorphic rather than neutral- words and deeds were related as

were words and things. The logos of creavon is of me same order: 'Let

there be light 1 is the uttering or outering of light.

Among others, Heraclitus discussed logos as the informing principle of

cosmology, of the kosmos For Heraclitus. god's chief name is Highest

Reason, Logos; and. in a different aspect, 'the Wise Being' or even 'the

Only Wise Being.' (Fr, 32). As F.M. Cleve explains, the divine body that

encircles the world is that pari of the resonant logos which never 'changes '

This part is not contained by the wor ld (Fr. 108), but keeps outside, as an

environment: The Logos does not dwell within the world, penetrating it,

but around the world Beyond the continent, the ocean, the air cover, the

fire of the stars, there is still the pyr aeizoon, the lasting body of the

Logos .., The Logos, then, is not in the world. This was changed later on by

the Stoics They imagined the world as penetrated by the Logos, thus

deviating from the genuine dogma of Heraclitus' (Cfeve, The Giants of

Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy, 78).

The Stoics revived much of Heraclitus's theodicy, but they reformulated

the doctrine of the logos for their own time, in a threefold pattern thai

served as a precursor of the trivium By their t ime the alphabetic ground

was becoming pervasive. The nature of kosmos was also transformed, so

That the Heraclitean god was translated from 'the outermost sphere around

37 Proteus Unbound

the world' to a position inside, 'penetrating the whole world.' The old

ground was becoming figure as visual space intensified.

In Fr. 30 r kosmos is identified wi th 'fire' (that is, energy) undergoing a

process, in which is found the essential relation between logos and

kosmos: 'it may not be going too far, therefore, to say that insofar as the

Logos, which is closely related to this kosmos, is thought of as a material

component of the things to which it is "common, " it is thought of as a form

of fire; to which should be added that Heraclitus perhaps as far as possible

avoided thinking about the Logos in this analytical way The Logos is the

formula, structure, plan, of each thing and all things: this is the important

point' (G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus, the Cosmic Fragments. 70).

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and ail

things, responsible for their nature and

configuration.

As C.H. Kahn shows in his treatment of the same fragment, 0 both the

kosmos and the logos that fnforms it are encyclopedic (as they concern the

universe, 'the world of nature taken in its widest sense') and both are

concerned with metamorphosis. These properties of the logos are of

particular importance to the later development of Stoic and Roman

grammar and rhetoric. Heraclitus made it far clearer than his immediate

predecessors that 'man himself is part of his surroundings' and not merely

a contained or detachable figure: 'in him, too, the logos is operative, and his

effective functioning depends upon action in accordance wi th it' - and so

upon his understanding of i t . 1 1

While common-sense acoustic space held sway, the cosmos was

perceived as a resonant and metamorphic structure informed by logos

'The structure of man's speech was an embodiment of the structure of the

world' (Harold Innis, Empire and Communication, 76). The boundless,

spherical, resonating kosmos of acoustic space constituted an environ­

mental ground of energies and potencies and forms, to which men, things,

10 C H Kahn. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, 224-5 Here kosmos is

jnderstood as referring to the entire sequence of world conditions as it were

simultaneously, and not to any one: it stands lor tne entire system of transformations

11 G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus, the Cosmic Fragments. 403 In Fr 112 is found,'the greatest

superiority is it to have wisdom, and wisdom it is to tell the truth and act in accordance wth

nature (i e., with the will of Logos), listening tor it (i.e., in intuitive comprehension)' (F M

Cleve, The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy, I 107).

38 Laws of Media

and events were almost accidentally figures, and into which they might

easily emerge. Figure was not yet abstract and was inseparable f rom its

metamorphic relation to ground. The universe was a verbal universe - a

perception that is reappearing in the twent ieth century, thanks to the new

ground of instantaneous electric information, which is in many ways similar

to Heraclitus's 'fire' or energy

... discontinuity... more than anything else brings new content, releases locked

powers, and opens up the greatest tasks in the realm of life no less then in the

realm of science.

Harald Hoffding,

The Problems of Philosophy

The only thing that can be urged against spherical space is that more than twenty

centuries ago a certain Greek published a set of axioms which (inferentially)

stated that spherical space is impossible.

A.S. Eddington,

The Expanding Universe

PROTEUS UNBOUND: Post-Euclidean Acoustic Space -The Twentieth Century

By the twentieth century, visual space was obsolesced in all fields and

acoustic space retrieved. The mechanical paradigm, enthroned in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was eventually replaced by a

field-mosaic approach. 1 2 In physics, a concerted, almost military opposition

12 As Langdon Winner observed: 'the mid-twentieth century has brought the eclipse of the

machine as a model for everything under the sun. Too many recent developments in

science and technology - quantum physics, relativity, modern chemistry and biology, the

alloys, plastics, the transistor - simply do not match the two primary images of the older

mechanical tradition: Newton's clockwork universe and the cog and wheel machine of

nineteenth-century industry Artifice has become more subtle Many devices properly

called machines are no longer truly mechanical Even Lewis Mumtord, who emphasizes

the idea of society as machine, has changed his emphasis to something called the " Power

Complex." What needs expression is the idea of a set of large-scale, complex,

interdependent, functioning networks which form the basis of modern life: for this, "the

machine" will no longer suffice' [Autonomous Technology, 193).

40 Laws af Media

was required to circumvent the centuries-old 'common-sense' assump­

tions of visual space. It was this revolution that impelled F M Cornford to

wr/te the sem*naJ essay 'The Invention of Space ' He opens hjs essay by

quoting the (1934) address of the president of the British Association to the

effect that, in the preceding half-century, the main edifice of science had

grown almost beyond recognition, as whole armies of labourers added

wing after wing, storey upon storey; 'Yet the theoretical physicist must

admit that his own department looks like nothing so much as a building

which has been brought down in rums by a succession of earthquake

shocks' (page 215).

Continuity pertains only to visual space, and therefore the phrase

'space-Time continuum' is misleading and a contradiction There is no

continuum' m acoustic space, whether pre- or post-Euclidean it is formed

as a discontinuous and resonant mosiac of dynamic figure/ground relation­

ships. Although the language used in discussing the new post-Euclidean

spaces reflects an underlying adherence to the visual- or absolute-space

model, the actual percept/on of the scientists is that of a mythic doubJe-pJot

of space and time without connections They maintain that 'there is no such

thing as a fixed interval of t ime independent of the system to which it is

referred.' Space and t ime serve as grounds for each other. Werner

Heisenberg illustrates the confusion inherent in their language "[in modern

physics], one has now divided the wor ld not into different groups of obiects

but into different groups of connections ... What can be distinguished is the

kind of connection which is primarily important in a certain phenomenon ...

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which

connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby

determine the texture of the whole' [Physics and Philosophy, 96).

Visual space is the only form of space that is purely mental: it has no

basis in experience because it is formed of abstract figures minus any

ground, and because it is entirely the side-effect of a technology.

To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends

the space' in its vicinity is to discuss visual space

in acoustic terms.

To talk of space being 'curved' is to 'do the old thing in the new way' j the

curved space' in question is a distortion of visual (Euclidean) space, which

is still clung to in language and thought. In acoustic space, which involves

41 Proteus Unbound

The dynamic interaction of a figure as a part of its ground, each thing creates

its own space; that is, it reshapes the ground even as it is shaped by the

ground.

In the words of MiliC Capek, in The Philosophical impact of Contempo­

rary Physics: 'In the general theory of relativity every motion, accelerated

or not, results naturally f rom the local structure of time-space' (page 178)

In this approach objects make their own space and are not contained in any

space. Consciousness itself would be a relation among objects or

experiences. Cornford realized that the 'new space' of science was a return

to pre-Euclidean awareness.

This post-Euclidean finite but unbounded space takes us back to the pre-

Euclidean finite but boundless sphere of Anaximander, Parmemdes, and

Empedocles. These philosophers did not know as much mathematics as

Einstein; but they had the advantage over Newton in knowing much less

mathematics than Euclid They had not been misled by geometry into

projecting its infinite space into the external world under the name of the

Void. The Euclidean era thus presents itself as a period of aberration, m

which common sense was reluctantly lured away from the position that it

has now, with no less reluctance, to regain. ('The Invention of Space.'

234-5)

In his foreword to Max Jammer's Concepts of Space, Albert Einstein

reports how the absolute forms were bypassed by means of a dynamic,

non-homogeneous field or ground;

The victory over the concept of absolute space or over that of the inertia!

system became possible only because the concept of the material object

was gradually replaced as the fundamental concept of physics by that of the

field. Under the influence of the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell the notion

developed that The whole of physical reality could perhaps be represented

as a field whose components depend on four space-time parameters. If

the laws of this field are in general covariant, that is, are not dependent on a

particular choice of coordinate system, then the introduction of an inde­

pendent (absolute) space is no longer necessary. That which constitutes the

spatial character of reality is then simply the four-dimensionality of the

field. There is no empty' space, that is, there is no space without a field,

(page xv|

A recent article by T.H. Boyer 'The Classical Vacuum' in Scientific

American, sings the same song: 'It is not empty Even when all matter and

heat radiation have been removed from a region of space, the vacuum of

classical physics remains filled wi th a distinctive pattern of electromagnetic

fields.'

42 Laws of Media

The 'victory' over Euclidean space was not

achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of

young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

The ground that informed the perceptions of these revolutionaries was that

of electrical experimentation and technology, even as the alphabet

informed and biased the perceptions of the atomists and early geometers.

Then, as now. the common-sense position stubbornly resisted the new

awareness. Regarding this resistance. Max Planck, the innovator of

quantum theory, observed: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by

convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather

because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar

with it.'

Lewis Feuer observed, in Einstein and the Generations of Science, that

'When the Zurich-Berne student circle was attracted by Mach's critique of

absolute space and Vme, ibey were moved strongly apart f rom scientific

arguments, by sociological, emotional, nonlogical factors For the most

powerful logicians of the t ime regarded Mach's arguments as utterly

unconvincing.' 1 3 With absolutes removed, the whole mode of perception

reverted from the abstract visual order instituted by our phonetic alphabet

back to the fluid and dynamic audile-tactile Gestalt, f rom isolated, rigidly

fixed figures to a mosiac of figure-ground interplay. As a perceptual

exercise Ernst Mach played with figure-ground reversability. |He| would

stand on a bridge, look fixedly at the water f lowing beneath, and the water

would seem to be in mot ion; but wi th "prolonged gazing," the water would

assume the appearance of being at rest, while "the bridge, with the

observer and his whole environment" would begin to move in the opposite

direction: "the relative motion of the obiects is in both cases the same 1 "

(Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science, 34).

13 Lew isS Feuer Einstein and the Generations oi Soence. 52 Feuer empnas zes the group

approach central r l l was the distinctive, revolutionary student culture o1 Zjneh and

Seme, rne tevotti'tonary tn\em<*ltoml of young iMelleciuels, thai pju^ded ihe cutwral SOJJ

in which a young Einstein with his unique personal [raits could find The neeessan,

supporting nutriments Without such a group, he himself felt that he would have perished

intellectually Such a group, with its Marxian and Machian cultural vectors, standing

physically outside the scientific establishment, was found only in Zuncn and Berne' ipage

521 'The Zurich-Berne circle was predominantly composed of students of Jewish origin -

Einstein, Adler. Besso, Solovine' (page 51).

43 Proleus Unbound

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in

principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra remarks the similarities between the

forms of awareness implicit in modern physics and the traditional

philosophy of Eastern, non-alphabetic cultures. The east bypasses hard­

ware and absolute concepts in favour of percepts, that is, a 'direct,

non-intellectual experience of reality,' A number of fundamental character­

istics are independent of the mystic's geographical, historical, or cultural

ground: 'The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view -

one could almost say the essence of it - is the awareness of the unity and

mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all

phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things

are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole, as

different manifestations of the same ultimate reality' (The Tao of Physics.

174). The East, which never had a phonetic alphabet, never had a Euclid and

never developed absolute concepts of space and t ime. However, now that

China is pressing a program of (our) alphabetic literacy wi thout attention to

its side-effects, it may be expected soon to develop abstract concepts and

a taste for hardware.

Once introduce discontinuity, once challenge any

of the properties of visual space, and as they flow

from each other, the whole conceptual framework

collapses.

Feuer notes that, 'quite apart from the discontinuous electronic transition

from one orbit to another, Bohr's theory of the atom departed in its total

imagery from the old model of the Newtonian, continuous world ... The

Kierkegaardian model reached so deeply into Bohr's thinking that he

described the atom in its transitions from one stationary state to another as

44 Laws of Media

possessing a "free choice" like that of the human subject choosing his

qualitative leaps from one stage to another.' 1 4

Kierkegaard's Concept of Dread was published in 1844, the year of the

telegraph, to which he alluded in the book as a sinister technology The

telegraph was the first technology of instantaneous communication

Kierkegaard made the discover/ that both the creative spirit and human will

act through sudden and discontinuous transitions or leaps. The same

figure-ground ambiguity obtained between Bohr's principle of complemen­

tarity and Kierkegaard's dread 'To Kierkegaard, dread was the point of

intersection of the nature-determined wor ld and the wor ld of the individual

free spirit; the person chose between them' (Feuer, Einstein and the

Generations of Science, 144). Complementarity served as an escape from

single, private, or abstract points of view, focusing on the inherent

multiplicity of 'perspectives' in the interactions between physical phenom­

ena and human observers. Bohr's coat of arms displayed the Chinese

yang-yin symbols of cosmic complementarity.

Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Louis de Broglie introduced

further components of acoustic space into physics wi th quanta, indetermi­

nacy, resonance, and wave mechanics Heisenberg simplified the general

presentation of quantum mechanics by abandoning 'the principle of

continuity in Riemannian or Euclidean geometry and introduced the

suggestion of a "smallest length" to meet certain difficulties in quantum

electrodynamics ' 1 [ 3

Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground probiem

arising from incongruity between the visual bias

of classical science and the new acoustic

sensibilities.

In his famous paper of 1927, Heisenberg based the notion of the

indeterminacy of the 'location of an electron' on the sympathetic mterac-

14 Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science. 136-7 Bohr reviewed his work in The

same terms 1 'The author suggested that every change m the stale o1 an atom should be

regarded as an individual process, mcapatrte of more detailed descttpvon. by which ih*

atom goes over from one so-called stationary state to another . We are here so tar

removed from a causal description that an atom in a stationary state may m general even be

said to possess a free-choice between various possible transitions to other stationary

stales' {Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. 24)

15 Jammer, Concepts of Space, 18B Jammer continues 'The impossibility of an exact

45 Proteus Unbound

tion of the phenomena under observation wi th the instruments and the

human observer (the Compton effect). Although obsolesced as a way of

doing things, of seeing the world, old visual space was retained as a fiction

('as if...'). (The same kind of conservatism greeted the new visual space in

ancient Greece.) As Max Jammer noted: 'In view of the great mathematical

difficulties involved in the construction of a geometry of discontinuous

space, however, physics has still to resort to the traditional geometry of a

continuous space by a statistical treatment of the concept of length. Thus

continuous space resumes its service, even for nuclear physics, but as a

convenient fiction for the statistical mathematization of physical reality'

{Concepts of Space, 188).

Another attack on continuity came from the quarter of logic: Lukasiew­

icz fashioned a three-valued logic in which things could be true, false, or

indeterminate. By attacking determinism and sequential ly, he undermined

The autonomy of efficient causality as well as that of history: 'We should

not treat the past differently f rom the future ... Facts whose effects have

disappeared altogether, and which even an omniscient mind could not infer

from those now occurring, belong to the realm of possibility. One cannot

say about them that they took place, but only that they were possible. It is

well that it should be so. There are hard moments of suffering and still

harder ones of guilt in everyone's life. We should be glad to be able to erase

them not only from our memory but also from existence' ('On Determin­

ism/ Polish Logic, 38-9).

Heisenberg endorsed Lukasciewicz's three-valued logic, and saw the

principle of indeterminacy as having similar implications: 'This knowledge

of the past is of a purely speculative character, since it can never (because

of the unknown change in momentum caused by the position measure­

ment) be used as an initial condition in any calculation of the future progress

of the electron and thus cannot be subjected to experimental verification. It

is a matter of personal belief whether such a calculation concerning the

past history of the electron can be ascribed any physical reality or not' (The

Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, 20). As the visual sense moves

back into interplay with the other senses, it is natural that rigid chronology

becomes fuzzy and uncertain. While these developments occurred in

science, our artists were articulating discontinuity and simultaneity for their

own publics.

In a further departure f rom visual absolutism, Louis de Broghe postu­

lated that even matter was constituted by acoustic waves - 'matter waves/

localization in combination with the determination of the momentum, and the related

dualistic wave-particle character of physical reality, can be interpreted as a challenge for a

cnticaf revision of the accepted space and time conceptions In his discussion ot electron

transitions between stationary states within the atom, Niels Bohr already called such

processes "transcending the frame of space and t ime"' (page 1891

46 Laws of Media

'The hypothesis at once showed its heuristic power, for it made possible

the derivation of the preferred, stationary, discontinuous orbits that Niels

Bohr had assigned TO h;s electrons in correspondence wi th the experimen­

tal spectral data 1 (Feuer, Einstein. 216). The resonant interval of acoustic

space is vibratory and discontinuous. As Einstein observed, The victory

over the concept of absolute space ... became possible only because the

concept of the material object was gradually replaced as the fundamental

concept of physics by that of the field' (Jammer, Concepts of Space, xv).

Figure yielded to ground mosiac, particle to field or resonant wave. De

Broglie wrote;

We have been gurded by the tdca thai îne corpuscle dnd its phase wave are

not physically different realities If one reflects one will see That the

following conclusion seems to fol low Our dynamics (its Emsteinian form

understood! has lagged behind optics, it still is m the stage of geometri­

cal opves Jf it seems to us today probable enough that every wave com­

ports concentrations of energy, by contrast the dynamics of a material

point undoubtedly conceals a propagation of waves, and the true sense of

the principle of least action is to express a concordance of phase {'Recherches

sur la Théorie de Quanta,' 33)

The philosopher Harald Hoffding, the Danish William Jamas, was

influenced by Kierkegaard and, in turn, greatly influenced his student, Niels

Bohr. In The Philosophy of Religion, he noted that 'the deepest foundation

for the principle of natural causation is the need for continuity, which J?es >n

the nature of our unconsciousness.' As Feuer shows [Einstein, 1 I2ff J, his

unique contribution to scientific thought was in exploring discontinuity. It

was discontinuity, he wrote, 'which more than anything else bnngs new

content, releases locked powers, and opens up the greatest tasks m the

realm of life no less than in the realm of science' (Hoffding, The Problems

of Philosophy, 8).

Commenting on the fallacy of specialization. Mi lie Capek points out that

chronological simultaneity was discovered as implicit in the discontinuous

interface of space and t ime, first formulated by Hermann Minkowski in

1908:

As soon as this fusion of space and lime was proposed, certain psychologi­

cal influences came into play and peculiarly distorted its true meaning

The very choice of the word which Minkowski used for designating this

fusion was charactistic: the four-dimensional continuum of points-events

was called by him 'the world' (die Welt) This indicated thai he understood

this fusion as an operation m which the temporal component was absorbed

by the spatial. In this respect Minkowski was not alone Emile Meyerson in

his philosophical commentary on the theory of relativity gives a long list

47 Proteus Unbound

of thinkers, both philosophers and physicists, who regarded the proposed

fusion as a spatialization of time; according to them, time itself has

become an additional fourth dimension of space m which all events, 'past,'

'present' and J future' were juxtaposed (The Philosophical Impact of Con­

temporary Physics, 154)

The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the

race/ had tuned in to the new ground and begun

exploring of discontinuity and simultaneity.

The service environment of electric information was developed throughout

the nineteenth century wi th the aid of, first, telegraph (and the telegraph

press), then the telephone. Electrical experimentation had been going on

for years (e.g., by Faraday) before the telegraph arrived, paving the way for

the new technology and helping to establish its ground or service

environment. The new electric sensibility, the percept of simultaneity, is

central to the development of modern poetry as well. T.S. Eliot opens his

Four Quartets w i th:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future.

And time future contained in time past. ...

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

In his 1917 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent,' Eliot observed that

the individual functions as a figure against 'Tradition,' the simultaneous

ground. 'Conformity' between the two is a con-forming, or mutual figure,

ground shaping or metamorphosis in which past and present modify each

other:

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens

simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing

monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by

the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The

existing order is complete before the new work arrives, for order to persist

after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if

ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each

work of art toward the whole are readjusted, and this is conformity

48 Laws of Media

between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of

the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous

that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is

directed by the past. (Eliot, Selected Essays. 15)

The awareness of this resonant interplay he termed the 'historical sense,' a

perception that 'the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and

within it the whole of the literature of [one's] own country has a

simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order' (page 14)

The French symbolist poets responded immediately and intuitively to

the ground introduced by the telegraph by retrieving pre-alphabetic forms

of discontinuous resonance and mimesis Baudelaire announced the

rediscovery of audience as mimetic ground for a work: his reader puts on

and wears the art as a means of correcting not his concepts but rather his

perception. The reader fs a mask-wearer Thypocnte'), the poem the mask:

'Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frère! 1

Edgar Allan Poe spoke of a 'suggestive indefiniteness' as preferable to

the clarity and distinctness demanded by visuai bias. This view was picked

up by the symbolist Mallarmé and reformulated. 'To name an object,' he

says, 'is to do away wi th three-quarters of that delight in a poem which

consists in unravelling it bit by bit. It must be suggested' (Oeuvres

Complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, 869; our translation). The ground

(audience) and figure (poem) are increasingly in interplay In 'The Philoso­

phy of Composition' Poe upset romanticized notions of artistic 'inspiration'

by insisting on the rhetorical principle of beginning wi th the desired effect.

The audience, as ground, shapes and controls

the work of art.

Théophile Gautier, in a preface to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. expanded

the pnncipfes in Poe's 'Philosophy of Composition,' adding an insistence on

the musical value of poetry, on pure sculptural form, and on the notion of

correspondence between the senses, developed on the basis of Baude­

laire's Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se confondent.' The senses,

intellect, and emotions are in abrasive interplay as a mosaic of author,

reader and poem

To cite but one example from a variety of such experiments, the English

'Imagist' school approached the matter only slightly differently; 'Imagism

is not the facile presentation of images or pictures, it is hard, clear,

unblurred statement, whether it uses metaphor or not It must be done by

49 Proteus Unbound

means of the chosen "exact wo rd " . "The exact word," says Mr. Aldington,

"does not mean the word which exactly describes the object in itself, it

means the exact word which brings the effect of that object before the

reader as it presented itself to the poet's mind at the t ime of writ ing the

poem' (J. Issacs, The Background of Modern Poetry, 45}, As in physics, the

'object' was being replaced by a ground-mosaic. The imagists were also

fascinated by the Japanese haiku ('stop-short') form, which involved the

careful juxtaposition of two situations without connections; the words stop

and the meaning goes on. For example, Ezra Pound's 'Fan-piece, for her

Imperial Lord':

0 fan of white silk.

Clear as frost on the grass-blade.

You also are laid aside.

or his more modern 'In a Station of the Metro'.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound and Eliot are the Cicero and Quintilian of our time, tirelessly

working to bring the language up to date and to retrieve for modern artistic

enterprise the ancient modes of rhetoric and grammar. 1 6 Pound's energy

and encyclopedic erudition impelled Eliot to nominate him as his ideal poet,

in the same terms used in our own tradition of learned studies (the

translatiostudiihom Cicero forward to Ramus) for the ideal orator, scholar,

and prince;

The historical method is. of course, the one which suits Mr Pound's tem­

perament: it fs also a conscious and consistent application of a procedure

suggested by Browning, which Mr Pound applies more consciously and

consistently than Browning did Most poets grasp their own time, the life of

the world as it stirs before their eyes, at one convulsion or not at all But

they have no method for closing in upon it. Mr. Pound's method is indirect

and one extremely difficult to pursue As the present is no more than the

present existence, the present significance, of the entire past. Mr. Pound

proceeds by acquiring the entire past: and when the entire past is acquired,

the constituents fall into place and the present is revealed. Such a method

involves immense capacities of learning and of dominating one's learn­

ing, and the peculiarity of expressing oneself through historical masks Mr.

Pound has a unique gift for expression through some phase of past life.

This is not archaeology or pedantry, but one method, and a very high method

of poetry. It is a method which allows of no arrest, for the poet imposes

16 Cf. Marshall McLuhan, 'Pound. Eliot and the Rhetoric of "The Waste Land"' [New Literary

History, X(197G-9}: 557 SO).

50 Laws of Media

upon himself, necessarily, the condition of continually changing his mask;

hsc et ubique, then we'll shift our ground. (Eliot, The Method of Mr.

Pound,' The Anthenaeum. 1065)

The great Irish poet W.B. Yeats turned to the Celtic oral bardic tradition

as a means of revivifying the poetry of his t ime and giving it proper acoustic

stress. He had spent his life studying Eastern and Greek and medieval

mythologies. In 1937 he said, in retrospect: 'I have spent my Jjfe tn clearing

out of poetry every phrase wr i t ten for the eye, and bringing all back to

syntax that is for the ear alone ... "Write for the ear," I thought, so that you

may be instantly understood as when actor or folk singer stands before an

audience I would have poetry turn its back on all that modish curiosity,

psychology' ( JAn Introduction for My Plays,' Essays and Introductions,

529-30!.

Poe had wr i t ten of 'a suggestive mdefiniteness' as an essential

ingredient of true musical poetry, referring to the power of resonance and

interplay of acoustic space as opposed to the rigid frameworks of visual

space. In a review of Thomas Moore's poetry, Poe commented on the

(discontinuous) double-plot as another fecund interval: 'The term mystic. .

is here employed in the sense of Schlegel and of most other German critics

It is applied by them to that class of composition in which there lies beneath

the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one.

What we vaguely term the moral of any sentiment is its mystic or

secondary expression. It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music'

(Issacs, The Background of Modern Poetry, 23).

When Isaac Newton, operating wi th the assumptions of visual space,

discussed the general laws of nature, he regarded them as manifest

qualities. 'theirTruth appearing to us by Phaenomena, though their Causes

be not yet discover'd For these are manifest Qualities, and their causes

only are occult/ Newton v iewed acoustic intervals and ground as interfer­

ing with the advance of science; 'such occult Qualities put a stop to the

Improvement of Natural Philosophy, and therefore of late Years have been

rejected' (Opttcks, 40l j

Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him,

conducted attention to 'continuous description'of

expérimentai phenomena instead of to causes.

In the Middle Ages, the usual practice, continued since antiquity, was to

employ multilevel causality as interpretation of the 'Book of Nature' and

51 Proteus Unbound

multilevel exegesis as interpretation of the 'Book of Scripture.' In both

systems, the levels were resonant and simultaneous, and the 'two Books'

formed an acoustically structured double-plot; like wave and particle, each

served as ground for the other. With the final advent of print and visual

space, the resonance was stilled. The double-plot structure had always

been regarded as both metamorphic and aetiological, as revealing form

(and formal causality], as, for example, in the Cosmographie of Bernard

Sylvestris. Paradoxically, causality was banished in the Renaissance as

unscientific, and only sequential 'efficient cause' remained, as Mario

Bunge relates

The Aristotelian teaching of causes lasted in the official Western culture

until the Renaissance- When modern science was born, formal and final

causes were left aside as standing beyond the reach of experiment, and

material causes were laken for granted in connection with all natural

happenings - though with a definitely non-Aristotelian meaning, since in the

modern world view matter is essentially the subject of change, not 'that

out of which a thing comes to be and which persists.' Hence, of the four

Aristotelian causes only the efficient cause was regarded as worthy of

scientific research. [Causality, 32)

With efficient cause, all study of effects (i.e., of ground! is set aside, this

having been the whole point of causality With the new 'long chains' of

'causes,' each efficient cause results in another efficient cause, and so on

The study of effects, because discontinuous, appears as occultism, as

Newton observed. But with intervals and such double-plot structures as

wave/particle complementarity, aetiology returned to modern science 7 In

literature, the great retrieval and exploration of the double-plot acoustic

structure was James Joyce's Ulysses. His contemporary T.S. Eliot wrote:

It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great impor­

tance H has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has

built a novel upon such a foundation before: il has never before been neces­

sary .

In using myth, m manipulating a continuous parallel between con­

temporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others

must pursue after him They will not be imitators, any more that the

scientist who uses The discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own. inde­

pendent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of order­

ing, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futiMy

and anarchy which is contemporary history. {'Ulysses, Order and Myth,'

James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, 201)

M Sor N*els Bohi WTQTP ibai quantum mechanics, by 'is essence entarls the necessity o1 a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radrcal revision ot cur attitude toward the problem of physical reality' [Atomic Theory and Human Knowledge, 60)

52 Laws of Media

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the

irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore

the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the

conscious and unconscious.

Arnold Schoenberg abandoned the visual strictures of tonality in composi­

tion for the 'multi-locationalism' of atonality:

in the years when Freud was diving into - and uncovering - The Uncon­

scious, so too was Schoenberg, because m a very real sense, having

abandoned tonality, and with it the 'subconsciously functioning sense of

form which gave a real composer an almost somnambulistic sense of

security m creating, with utmost precision, the most delicate distinctions of

formal elements,' Schoenberg had only his Unconscious to look to as

poienl^J source of the means and principles of unity and organization which

would replace the lost paradise on tonality (D Mitchell, The Language of

Modern Mussc. 39)

As Donald Mitchell remarked, 'By the end of the nineteenth century the

governing principle of tonality, which had created and served a language of

mustc of wonderful richness, had become so weakened that it couJd no

longer divulge the new vocabulary which was required to match the new

images of composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky' (pages 58-9).

Atonality in music represents the abandonment of the 'central key,' that

is, of a single perspective or organizing frame to which all elements of a

composition are related. That is, tonality served as a figure to which to

relate other figures in an abstract way, in the mosaic of acoustic space,

each element creates its own space, and everywhere 15 the centre of the

sphere Using atonality, as it were (as in acoustic space), wherever you are

at the moment' is the key you're in, the tonal centre, and the governing

consideration is the nature of and effect on the overall pattern. Such space

is not uniform but rather a multidimensional dynamic of figure and ground

Schoenberg wrote, 'THE TWG-OR-MORE DIMENSIONAL SPACE IN WHICH M U S I C S

IDEAS AKE PRESERVED is A i jNir . Though the elements of these ideas appear

separate and independent to the eye and the ear, they reveal their true

meaning only through their cooperation, even as no single word alone can

express a thought wi thout relation to other words. All that happens at any

point of this musical space has more than a local effect It functions not only

in its own plane but also in all other directions and planes' {Style and Idea,

109).

53 Proteus Unbound

Jeremy Rifkin shows that, thanks to the computer, visual, centralized

time is as obsolete as visual space. The Central Processing Unit orchestrates

a ballet of operations in simultaneous times, chronology in counterpoint

The second distinguishing feature o i the computer is Us temporal creativity

David Bolter, author of Turing's Man, points out that while clocks are all

set to the same exacting sequence, duration, and rhythm, the computer is

free to manipulate all three of these temporal dimensions by merely

changing the program.

The computer imprints a unjque temporality into every program Every

computer has an electronic timer in its central processor The timer releases

electrical impulses at specific intervals allowing the central processor 'to

execute one by one the instructions given in its program

The electronic timer provides the measure by which the processor ticks

its way through its calculations, ensuring that the electrons have settled

down, lhat one step 15 finished before the next is begun The instructions

themselves may require varying amounts of time . This variation

must be taken into account by the sequencing mechanism, which de­

cides how many pulses of time to allot to each instruction IDanrel Bell,

'The Clock Watchers.'55|

Bolter argues that time is a resource for the computer just as coal is a

resource for the steam engine Time is used to transform 'billions of

countless impulses of electrical energy into useful instructions for mani­

pulating data.' The difference, then, between clocks and computers is that

'an ordinary clock produces onlv a series of identical seconds, minutes and

hours; a computer transforms seconds or microseconds or nanoseconds

into information.' With this new timepiece, time is no longer a single fixed

reference point that exists external to events. Time is now 'information'

and is choreographed directly in1o the programs by the central processor.

With computers we enter the age of 'multiple times.' Every program has

its own sequences, durations, rhythms, its own unique time.

While the clock establishes the notion of artificial time segments - hours,

minutes, and seconds - it remained tied to the circadian rhythm The

clock dial is an analogue of the solar day, an acknowledgment that we

perceive time revolving m a circle, corresponding to the rotation of the

earth In contrast, computer time is independent of nature, it creates its

own context. [Time Wars, 101-2)

In acoustic space, everything or event creates Its own space, and t ime.

Since the invention of huge parallel computers, for sharing the 'inner

workload,' tabletop models now comprise dozens of mini-computers:

soon, overall choreography may become necessary

Georg von Bekesy in his Experiments in Hearing offers a strategy for

bypassing the difficulties that visually oriented people (those who regard

54 L a w s of Media

v i sua l s p a c e a s ' c o m m o n s e n s e ) h a v e in c o n c e i v i n g of a c o u s t i c s p a c e A s

o n e p ro f i c ien t in aud i to r y s p a c e s , h e is k e e n l y a w a r e of t h e d i f f icu l ty of

ta lk ing abou t t h e s p a c e of h ea r i ng , fo r t h e a c o u s t i c a l is n e c e s s a r i l y a w o r l d

in ' d e p t h / ¡1 is of t h e u t m o s t i n t e r e s t that *n t ry ing to e l u c i d a t e t h e n a t u r e of

hea r i ng a n d of a c o u s t i c s p a c e , v o n B e k e s y s h o u l d de l i b e r a t e l y a vo id

v i ewpo i n t a n d p e r s p e c t i v e in f a vou r of mosa i c- f i e l d A n d to t h i s e n d h e

r e so r t s to two-d i r nens iona f pa in t ing a s a m e a n s of r e v e a l i n g t he r e s o n a n t

d ep t h of a c o u s t i c s p a c e .

ft is possib le To dist inguish Two fo rms of approach to a problem One. wh/ch

may be cal led the theoret ical approach, is to formulate the problem in

relation to what is already known, to make addit ions or ex tens ions on the

b3$is of accep ted principles, and then to p roceed to Test t hese hypo theses

experimentally. Another, wh ich mav be cal led the mosa i c approach, takes

each problem for itself wi th little re fe rence to the field in wh i ch it l ies and

s e e k s to d iscover relations and pr inciples that hold within the c i r cumsc r ibed

area.

A d o s e anaiogv to t hese two app roaches may be found m the f/eld of art

In the period be tween the e leventh and seven teen th centu r ies the A rabs

and the Pers ians deve loped a high mas te ry of the arts of descr ipt ion .

Later, during the Rena i s sance , a n e w form of representat ion w a s de­

veloped in wh ich the at tempt w a s made to give unity and pe rspec t i ve to the

picture and to represent the a tmosphe re

When m the field of s c i e n ce a great deal of p rogress has been made and

most of the pertinent var iables are known, a n e w problem may mos t

readiiy be hand/ed tjy trying to fit tl into the ex/si/ng framework. When ,

however, the f ramework is uncertain and the numbe r of var iables is large

the mosa ic approach is much the e a s i e r . 1 8

18 Experiments in Hearing, 4 Siegfried Giedion describes cubism- 'it views obiecis

relatively (hat is. ircm several points of view nooneof whichhasexcJuS'veaurfioriTy And

in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides - from above and below,

from inside and outside. Ii goes around and into its objects. Thus, so the Ihree d.mansions

of The Renaissance, which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many

centuries, there ^ added a fourth one-time'lSpace, Time and Architecture, 436) Mitchell

[The Language of Modern Music, 75) comments: 'The presentation of ob|ects from

several points of view,' he continues, 'introduces a principle which is intimately bound up

with modem life - simultaneity', and that very principle is no less intimately bound up with

much modern architecture, where we may comprehend inside and outside and many

other hitherto hidden relations - simultaneously; an experience which r previously was

dependent upon chronological appraisal of isolated relations Apprehension o' The totaf

relation between all the pans (or planes) could only be accomplished by a feat of mental

reconstruction. A simple example of the kind of simultaneity Giedion has m mind is the

combined profile and Mi 'ace whrch we encounter rrr Prcasso's portrait L'Aries/ewe,

painted in the early years of the twentieth century Another is L_e Corbusier's astounding

Villa Savoye (1929-31), which conveys a simultaneity of exterior and interior, of inner and

outer space, with b>eaihiai>ng virtuosity '

55 Proteus Unbound

The mosiac approach is not only 'much the easier' in the study of the

simultaneous, which is the auditory field; it is the only relevant approach. In

the iconic and mosaic form there is no attempt to reduce space to a single,

uniform, and connected character such as was done wi th perspective: ft is

a simultaneous field of relations Mosaic, iconic form is discontinuous,

abrupt, and multilevelled, as is iconic art The 'two-dimensional' mosaic or

painting is the mode in which there is muting of the visual as such, in order

That there may be maximal interplay among all of the senses. Such was the

painterly strategy 'since Cezanne/ to paint as if you held, rather than as if

vou saw r objects

Cubism Cmulti-locationalism'} is one of the

painterly forms of acoustic space.

Paralleling Schoenberg, cubist painting abandons single fixed points of

view along with Euclidean geometry and perspective The subject is

presented, not a merely seen, but as known, f rom many sides simulta­

neously Siegfried Giedton explains how, by using simultaneity and

transparency, artists escaped the static container that was visual space

'Around 1910 Picasso and Braque, as a consequence of a new conception

of space, exhibited the interiors and exteriors of objects simultaneously In

architecture Le Corbusier developed, on the same principle, the interpéné­

tration of inner and outer space . But this interpénétration of space at large

and space-particles could have further development only in an age whose

science and art both perceived space as essentially many-sided and

dynamic.'19

The new philosophies, logics, and linguistics of our t ime are also born of

The shift from visual to acoustic space and modes of awareness, under the

same pressure from the ground of electric technology De Broglie saw a

rapprochement between wave mechanics and the philosophy of Berg-

son.20 As Wyndham Lewis explains, in the nineteenth and early twent ieth

19 Giedion, Soace_ Time anijArchitecture, 521 The (heme of Mitchell's study is that atonahtv

and cubism are formally equivalent Tt seems Co me therefore, that to draw a parallel

between Cubism and the New architecture, on The one hand, and Schoenberg/s melhcd

ontheother. is to plot a genuine identrty of pattern between the arts n a given period, and.

in tact, the parallel between the development of Cub>sm and serial technique runs more

strictly than I may have suggested' (Mitchell, The Language of Modern Music, 77, vtde

also pages 77-93, and passim)

20 Feuer [Etnszem, 220-1) observes 'Louis de Broglie saw a confirmation of this view in the

developments oi quantum physics " If Bergson could bave studied quantum t n e w m

detail, he would have observed that m the image of The evolution of The physical world

56 L a w s of Med ia

centurtes, îhe ans, especially pa i r i ng , took their cue from the sciences. 2 ] It

was in the heyday of radio, he notes, that artists switched from the natural

sciences to politics and ideology and philosophy, f rom hardware to soft­

ware, from 'outside' to 'inside/ in a sense aboitsb/ng the merely outside

world:

Before The coming of Politics, S c i e n c e dominated our s c e n e Artistic ex­

t remism, prior to the ' twent ies of this century, a lways w a s in s o m e way

related to Sc i ence . The Impress ion is t revolution for ins tance m the last

century w a s purely sa&nvhc in inspiration or to lake an illustration from

literature, the unorthodox form taken by the narrative art m the hands of

Henry J a m e s der ived from the new s c i e n ce of psychology, m wh i ch his

which it offers us, at each instant naiure is described as if nes:tatmg between a mult piicitv

o f possibilities and he could doubtless have repeated as in The Creative M'.io1 that 'lime is

this very hesitation or it 's nothing ' " Quantum theory also seemed to de Brogl e to have

confirmed Bergson's ms-ght that reality was characterized by 'nterpenetrat on. by £usion of

its components individualities such as atoms or sensations, related to eacn other bv

purely externa/ relations were demarcated for practice reasons, bur were not ninosir Jo

the nature of reality Reality was more akin to a syrr.pnony of music n wh ch the notes

modify each other, cornpenetrating m melody So de Broglie aeclared mat n wave

mechanics, too it was impossible m dealing with a group of particles c , r the same phvsical

nature, to give to each â distinct individuality. For that is poss ble onlv wn^n one c-in

distinguish particles through their different spatial positions, whereas ' m wave mechan'cs.

one cannot'.n general attribute to particles well-defined positions m space if tneir regions

of possibfe presence merge or ovehap - w/rcn w.H most o'ten happen - /TOW t a 1 , one

follow their individualityJ Thus wave mechanics has given up mdividual.zmg particles and

following the evolution of each separately with the course of l ime" ' [quotations m the

above passage were from de Broglie 'Recherches sur la théorie de Quanta ' 57 and 59)

21 Cf Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts. 23 'In the first decades of the

last century painting, to start with, merely mirrored the mighty battle of the new and

the old. so there was a grand cleavage mio two schools of prunting. me classicism of

Ingres stand-ng confronted by The romanticism of Defdcroi* or Genc.iuit A new 'ac te

becomes apparent after that namely the mvas'on of the visual arts by the sDirit of

scientific discovery-the French painters were se zed by the des're to mo<e their mnation

of nature more ^oentihcgliy exaci They studied the theory D f colour and th.s eventually

led to the following system- (11 the colour^ were, as usual, squeezed out upon thy

palette; (2) the colours were not mixed with one another, ne'ther on the palette nor

on the canvas, small dabs of each colour were transferred intact from omette lo canvas.

(3) the theory was tnat the colours would mix m the eye or the spectator - tne\ must

never be allowed to mix anywhere else, but to preserve their original pur ty The

Pomiillistes adhered most rigidly to this rule and were the culmination of these

experiments A borrowing of a quite d'Herern k,nd horn sC'eoce. <n the gies&n\ cen*ur\

was jeeringly named Cubism So. from the middle of the last century, a pseudo

scientific impulse had been apt to start some scnooi. reflected from science, tnere has

been the impulse incessantly lo perfect constantly discarding what has been Lettered

like yesterday's model m the motor-car industry, and last, but not least, the fiery rrilienn al

zeal of the social revolutionary emotionally galvanizing everytning, and instilling tne

painter with a quite irrational behe f in the nghmess of his latest mannerism '

57 Proteus Unbound

brother William w a s a pioneer. Art ists behaved as if they we r e attempt­

ing to outstrip each other in noveltv of techn ica l invention - as Though tbev

were men-of-science, and an we r e an affair ot techn ica l d iscovery Th is

pseudo-scientific snobbfsm still haunts the notion of being artistically 'ad­

vanced' but that is as it we r e a time-lag in publicity techn ique {The Wrner

and The Absolute. 43-4}

Tom Wo l f e h a s d i s c o v e r e d t h i s s a m e k ink in our a r t s or r e v e r s a l f r om

outside to ins ide, f rom t h e big pub l i c to t h e in-group. H i s t w o s t u d i e s The

Painted Word a n d From Bauhaus to Our House de ta i l t h e e l e c t r i c u r ge to

drive inward:

For that matter, in most of the higher arts rn Amer i ca prest ige w a s now

determined by European-style c le r is ies By the mid-1960s, painting w a s

a truly advanced case. The Abst ract Exp ress ion is ts had held on as rhe ruling

compound (in-groupl for about ten years, but then new theories, n ew

compounds, new codes began succeed i ng one another m a berserk rush.

Pop Art, Op Art, Min imal ism. Hard Edge, Color Field, Earth Art. Concep­

tual Art-the natural bias of the compounds toward arcane and baffling wen t

beyond all known limits. The spec tac le w a s crazy, but young artists tended

to believe - correctly - that it w a s imposs ib le to ach ieve major s ta tus with­

out joining in the game In the field of ser ious mus ic , the c a s e w a s even

more advanced, m fact, it w a s very nearly terminal. Wnhm the university

compounds, compose r s had b e c o m e so ultra-schoenbergian, so exquisitely

abstract, that no one from the outs ide wor ld any longer had the sl ightest

interest m, much l e s s comprehens ion of. what w a s going on. In The cit ies,

not even that Gideon's army known as 'the concert-going public' could be

drawn to an all-contemporary program 7 2

22 Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus TO Our House. 88-9 Such concerts 'took place only in

university concert halls'1 'Here on the campus the program begins with Scott Joplm s

"MapteLeaf Bag," followed bv one of SlocVhausen's early compositions " Punkte " then

Babbitl's Ensembles for Synthesizer, a little Easley Blackwood and Jean Barraque tor a

change of pace, then the committed plunge into a random-note or, as they say,

"stochastic" piece for piano, brass, Woog synthesizer and computer by Iannis Xenakis

The program winds up with James P Johnson's "You Gotta Be Modernistic: " Joplm and

Johnson, of course, are as cozy and familiar as a lullaby, but they are essential to the

program The same thirty-five or <orty souls, all of them faculty members and graduate

students, make up the audience at every contemporary mus'cal event The unspeakable

fear is that not even they wifl show up unless promised a piece ot candy at the beginning

and a piece of candy at the end Joplm and Johnson numbers are okay because both men

were black and were not appreciated as serious composers m their own day' (pages

89-901

58 L a w s of Med ia

T h e art c o m p o u n d w i t h i ts c l e r i s y , a s W o l f e t e r m s t he c i r c l e of h igh p r i e s t s

a n d t rue b e l i e v e r s , r e v i v e s t he vates of t h e R o m a n r e n a i s s a n c e of t h e

e m p e r o r A u g u s t u s . T h e vates, or poe t -p r i e s t s at t h e t e m p l e of Pa l a t i n e

Apo l lo - H o r a c e , Virgi l, a n d c o m p a n y - r e s p o n d e d to s u d d e n r e c e n t

a d v a n c e s in c ra f t a n d t he u s e of t h e imag i na t i on , by re t r i ev ing a n d upda t i ng

tradit ion a g a i n s t t h e m e r e l y p r i va te or s e n h m e n t a i u s e o f art rst rc e m o t i o n .

T h e R o m a n t e r m c o m b i n e d t he no t i o n s of p r i e s t a n d s o o t h s a y e r w i t h that

of s e r i o u s ar t is t c h a r g e d w i t h r e spons i b i l i t y fo r ma i n t a i n i ng a n d upda t i ng

l a nguage a n d cu l t u r e a n d the i r re la t ion to t rad i t ion. H o r a c e w r o t e .

Quodsi me lyricubus vatibus inseres

Sublimi fenam sidera vertice

Lyncus vates the patina of time and tradition p reven ts us i rom realizing the

full paradox of this callida tunctura, wh i ch wou ld have as tounded Lucret ius,

for example. The noun is Augus tan : the adject ive is Alexandr ian (it w a s

Cal l imachus who bad wan ted to put lyr icism back into poetry) The who le

history of the Augus tan exper iment in poetry can be read in t hese two

wo r d s . 2 J

In The Painted Word. W o l f e s h o w s h o w t he p r e s s c r i t i cs m a d e

t h e m s e l v e s the t h e o l o g i a n s , a n d the a r t i s t s , t h e p r i e s t s , of e a c h n e w s e c t

and s t y l e (wa y of s e e i n g ) of t h e TV a n d t h e co lou r- i v p e r i o d s A r c h i t e c t s had

no equ i va l en t a r m y of c r i t i c s a n d r e v i e w e r s t oco-op t , no p n m a c h i n e to hand

to mob i l i ze , s o t h e y f o r m e d c o m p o u n d s ' or tribal m-groups T h e w h o l e

p u r p o s e of t h e c o m p o u n d w a s not to a d a p t o r d e v e l o p o u t w a r d l y but to

exp lo i t a n d e xp l o r e i nne r m o d e s of b e i n g a n d c o m p l e x sens ib i l i t y .

In h i s d i s c u s s i o n of t h e fa l l acy of s p e c i a l i z a t i o n / C a p e k o b s e r v e d ;

The impossibil ity of separat ing s pace from t ime w a s for the first t ime clearly

formulated by H M tnkowskun 1908 It w a s then that the concep t of the

relauvistic space-t ime cont inuum w a s explicitly formulated, although mathe­

matically it w a s implied m Lorentz 's t ransformation ...

Accord ing to Einste in himself, 'becoming ' in the three-dimensional s pace

has been t ransformed into 'being' in the wor ld of four d imens ions , accord­

ing to Herman Weyf, 'the obfect ive wor id is. it d o e s not become ' , rt appears

to b ecome only to our 'blindfolded c o n s c i o u s n e s s ' (abgeblendete Rewuss t-

sein) wh ich c r eeps along its 'world line' into the future {The Philosophical

impact of Contemporary Physics. 158-9)

23 J K Newman Augustus and the New Poetry, 130 Newman introduces the quote as

follows: 'There are five occurrences of vates in Odes I — 111 (1,1 35; 1,31,2, II.6.24, 11.20,3.

arrd lb* and no use of poeta ai The first sample is in the programme poem a\

The beginning of the collection Uhe metre indicates its nature.!

59 Proteus Unbound

The chiaroscuro of 'Becoming' as a sequential

process has been pushed aside and replaced by

the iconic absolutism of 'Being.'

Being is multidimensional and environmental and admits of no point of

view. As with any other ground. Being cannot be perceived directly; it has

to be seen by side-effects. Traditionally, the Westerner had placed stress

on goals and becoming, so the Chinese observed that he was always

getting ready to Jive.'

As all conceptual absolutes had been dissolved by the new electric

ground and had been replaced by percepts, the first reaction, in philosophy

as elsewhere, was to regard the result as simply solipsism. Solipsism is

going through the old motions, as if concepts still reigned, minus the

ground-continuum of visual space: it is the prelude to transcendentalism

and occultism, which bypass individualism lHa man all wrapped up in

himself makes a very small package').

It was visual space in its aspect of container that was reflected in

thinking of an 'inside' or 'outside' world Prior to the alphabet there was no

'outside world,' no apparent separation of inner and outer, only the

metamorphic flux of modes of being. Private identity is pushed to its

extreme, or breakdown point, with solipsism, and it may well be that

solipsism, on a corporate scale, is what we call tribalism. With the return of

acoustic space through the ground of electric technology, the visual forms

of detachment and of separation of inside and outside were dissolved

Solipsism is the first response' there is no (abstract) 'outside wor ld' - all

'reality' is fantasy - and 'the OTHER1 poses a challenge

Solipsism is using percepts whi le behaving as if using concepts, which is

why it seems to have pervaded modern linguistics and philosophy. The

reaction, in art and physics, was to explore the flux of interaction of

observerand observed, as in the Symbolists and Moderns and the Cubists

Capra remarked that the recognition by science of the interaction of the

observer and the observed phenomena implies, ultimately, that the

structures and phenomena we observe in nature are nothing but creations

of our measuring and categorizing mind ' He goes on to observe a crucial

correspondence.

That this is so is one of the fundamental tenets of Eastern philosophy The

Eastern mystics tell us again and ao,am that all things and events we

perceive are creations of the mind, ansing from a particular state of con­

sciousness and dissolving again if this state JS transcended. Hinduism

60 Laws of Media

holds that al) shapes and structures around us are created by a mind under

the spell of maya, and it regards our tendency to attach deep significance

to them as the basic human illusion Buddhists call this illusion avtdya, or

ignorance, and see it as the state of a 'defiled' mind In the word? of

Ashvaghosha ( The Awakening of Faith, 79, 86), 'When the oneness of the

totality of things is not recognized, then ignorance as well as particular-

isation arises, and all phases of the defiled mind are thus developed .. ALL

phenomena in the world are nothing but the illusory manifestation of the

mind and have no reality of their own.' (77ie Tao of Physics. 292-3)

There is no individualism in Eastern or oral

cultures.

The same principles are present, implicitly, in Heisenberg's uncertainty

principle. Heisenberg himself longed to escape the world of concrete

things and to replace it w i th transcendent ' f o r m s / 2 4 In the absence of visual

space, the only available technique for avoiding solipsism is to press

solipsism to the ex t reme-to nihilism. Capra shows how this shift is already

implicit in physics: the same transformation has occurred in philosophy and

metaphysics Edmund Husserl proposed a new strategy for philosophy,

phenomenological philosophy, founded in a new technique - bracketing.

'Absolute Being' and 'absolute experiences' are the objective whereas

scientists pursue reflections in accordance wi th the 'logic of experience.'

At the phenomenological standpoint, acting on lines of general principle, we

tie up the performance of all such cogitative theses, i.e., we place in

brackets' what has been carried out, 'we do not associate these iheses'

with our new inquiries, instead of living in them and carrying them out,

we carry out acts of reflexion directed towards them, and these we appre*

2 4 feuer. Em$te/n and the Generations of Sconce. 1 6 ? 'The efforts oi representational an TO

conform to the familiar patterns ot the common-sense, visual world were to the surrealist what models of the classical quantum physicists were to Werner Heisenberg and the new generation; the latter repudiated the efforts to picture the electrons as moving m planetary ortj'Xs around ihe atomic nucleus Artd>e Breion called sjmiiarly forme liberation o* agists from the limitation of the laws of perspective, gravity, and extension IT was part and parcel of iheir project to "overturn the foundations of our stupid bourgeois cullure," and to "revolutionize our moral and social values." The quest was for a " super-real'ty "

'As Heisenberg was dtszlfected from the eveiysjay i£dl>\>es of mateual objects and longed to see them superseded by sp*ntual mathematical forms, tfiat is. Platonic ideas, so the surrealist strove to "burst the bonds of reason of narrow rationalism." to permeate the world of reality with that ol dreams to engender a "super-reality

6t Proteus Unbound

hand as the absolute Be ing wh ich thay are. W e now live entirely in such

acts of the second level, w h o s e da tum is the infinite field of absolute ex­

periences- the basic field of Phenomenology (Husser l , Ideas General

introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1551

Respond ing to t he s u d d e n d i s a p p e a r a n c e of v i s u a l s p a c e , H u s s e r l

adopts the E a s t e r n e r ' s m e t h o d of r e ga r d i ng t he ' rea l w o r l d ' a s a m a n i f e s t a ­

tion of a 'part icular s t a t e of c o n s c i o u s n e s s ' 'Rea l i t y , ' h e w r o t e , that of the

thing taken s ing ly a s a l s o that of the w h o l e w o r l d , e s s e n t i a l l y l a c k s

i ndependence ' In o t h e r w o r d s , t h e i n s i d e / o u t s i d e v i s ua l d i c h o t o m y h a s

dissolved. H e c o n t i n u e s , 'Rea l i t y is no t in i tse l f s o m e t h i n g a b s o l u t e , b i nd i ng

itself to ano t he r on ly in a s e c o n d a r y w a y , it is, a b s o l u t e l y s p e a k i n g , no t h i ng

at all, it h a s no " a b s o l u t e e s s e n c e " w h a t e v e r , it h a s the e s s e n t i a l i t y of

someth ing w h i c h in p r inc ip le is only i n ten t iona l , only k n o w n , c o n s c i o u s l y

presented a s a n a p p e a r a n c e . ' 2 &

His t e c hn i q ue is t h e ' b r a c ke t i n g ' of p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l r e d uc t i o n ' -

anticipated s o m e w h a t b y Ma r v e l l in ' T h e G a r d e n ' :

Meanwhile, the mind, f rom p leasure less,

Withdraws into its happ iness

The mind, that ocean whe r e each kind

Does straight its own r e semb lance find.

Yet it creates, t ranscending these,

Far other worlds, and other s e a s .

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade .

Hu s s e r i s ' r educ t i on ' c r e a t e s a n e w spl i t b e t w e e n i nne r a n d ou t e r

exper ience, in o rde r to d r i ve e v e r m o r e i n w a r d :

instead of naively carrying out the acts proper to the nature-constituting

consciousness with its t ranscenden t t h e s e s , and so forth - w e sot all

these theses 'out of action,' w e take no part in t hem; w e direct the g lance

of apprehension and theoret ical inquiry to pu re consciousness in its own

absolute B&ing It is this wh ich remains over as the 'phenomenologica l

residuum' we we re in ques t of remains over, w e say, although w e have

Suspended' the who le wor ld, wi th all things, living creatu res, men , our­

selves included W e have literally lost nothing, but have w o n the who le

25 Husserl, /dess, 154 He reiterates What is essential lor our purpose is to see upon

evidence that the phenomenological reduction, as a means of discontenting us from the

natural standpoint and its general thesis, is possible, and that, when earned out, the

absolute or pure transcendental consciousness is left over as residuum, to which it is then

absurd to ascribe reality (RealitaO Ipage 170)

62 Laws of Media

of Absolute Being, which, properly understood, conceals itself m all tran­

scendences, constituting' them within itseif" 2 Q

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a

massive and decentralized quest for roots, for

ground.

Husserl includes the occult or psychic experience, as indicating and as a

part of transcendant consciousness Here hts affinities with Eastern

mysticism are most in evidence, that is, with the tenet that 'all things and

events we perceive are creations of the mind, arising from a particular state

of consciousness and dissolving again if that state is transcended '

Even psychical states point to the ordering condit ions of absolute ex­

per iences in wh ich they are const i tued and take on the intentional and m its

way transcendent form 's ta le of c o n s c i o u s n e s s '

Certainly an incorporeal and r paradoxical as it may sound, even an inani­

mate and non-personal c o n s c i o u s n e s s is conce ivab le, i.e., a s t ream of

exper ience in wh i ch the intentional empir ical unities, body, soul, empir ical

ego-sub/ec? do not lake shape, in which all t hese empjr icaJ concep ts , s nd

therefore a lso that of experience in the psychological sense (as expe r ience

of a person, an animal ego), have nothing to support t hem, and, at any

rate no validity. iHusser l , Ideas. 167)

Martin Heidegger has found a variation on the theme For him, too, the

actual is not a first consideration: actuality emerges from a 'standing

reserve' of unrealized possibilities that were obscured or brushed aside by

act. 'The essence of modern technology lies in Enframing. Enframing

belongs within the destining of revealing' [The Question Concerning

Technology, 25) 'Enframing/ he explains,

26 Husserl, Ideas. 154-5 For detail. ' In the first place it goes without sayng that w Hi the

suspending of the natural world, physical and psychological all mdivdual objectivities

which are constituted through the functional activities of consciousness in valuation and n

practice are suspended - all varieties of cultural expression, works o* tne technical and of

the fine arts, of [he sciences aiso (so far as we accepr tnem as culttjial facts :/ri<] not as

vaiidity-systemsf. aesthetic and practical values of every shape arid form Natural in the

same sense are also realities of such kinds as state, moral custom, law religion Tnerewith

all the sciences natural and mental, with the entire knowledge the v have accumulated.

undergo disconnexion as sciences which require for their development the naijrai

standpoint' (page 1 71).

63 Proteus Unbound

'is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets man

upon and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering,

as standing-re serve. As the one who is challenged forth in this wav. man

stands withm the essential realm of Enframrng .. The essence of modern

technology starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real

everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve. (The

Question Concerning Tecnnofogyr 24)

Heidegger quite accurately observes that modern technologies, electric

media, are responsible for the return to acoustic and Eastern forms of

awareness, which, as w e shall see in the next chapter, render experience

discarnate.

Heidegger's language is driven to incomprehensibility by tortured

translation In the German, however, he is wi t ty and concise, and his

discussions pay close attention to the play of etymologies in his terms, in an

evident attempt to retrieve grammatical stress as a new mode of dialectic

'Enframing' is not a batch of concepts, but a special technique of

perception that reveals the ground. Since 'the actual' emerges as a figure

from the ground of 'standing reserve,1 it 15 the latter realm that becomes for

him the phenomenologist's quarry. Heidegger is using Husserl's rubric that

'the possible precedes the actual,' which is to observe abstractly that

ground comes before figure He has not noted that the ground is formed as

a mosaic, structured acoustically, nor that its structure is entirely due to its

interface with figures.

Like the physicists, Heidegger is trying to do the

new thing in the o/d way: he has retrieved

percepts as a too/ for exploring the occu/t

(hidden) area, but the manner is stiii abstract

{visual).

There is in Heidegger still no sense of interplay between figure and ground,

The attention has just been shifted from one to the other without trying to

take the new thing on its own terms. That is, ground cannot be dealt with

conceptually or abstractly: it is ceaselessly changing, dynamic, discontinu­

ous and heterogeneous, a mosaic of intervals and contours As von Bekesy

discovered, the appropriate form of awareness is acoustic-tactile-kmetic

and alive to the stress and coercion that each exerts on the other The

64 Laws of Media

necessary training is not available in philosophy and dialectic. Yet it does

exist both in the arts as training of perception, and in our Western learned

tradition as grammatical training of critical awareness for application to both

the wrrtten book and the Book of Nature

In the passage quoted above. Heidegger seems to insist that reality will

be revealed when all act has, through the ground of electric technology,

been obliterated or relegated back to the realms of potencies; anything that

initiates that process constitutes the 'realm of f reedom. l ? 7 That is, freedom

from the materia/ bond is attainable when, by mimesis, we submit To

electric technology 'When we once open ourselves expressly to the

essence of technology, we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a

freeing claim' {The Question Concerning Technology, 26).

This submissive interiorizing of modern technology necessitates a total

shelving of private identity or merely humanistic values 1 robotism The

acoustic power available to the poetic establishment that Plato warred

against was puny by comparison to the sensory stress exerted by any one

of our technologies and its grounds. Plato realized that civilization did not

have a chance until the mimetic spell of the bards was broken To re-enter

that world is to cast off the civilized - which seems to have escaped

Heidegger, for he identifies the merge wi th electric technology with the

path to salvation: 'As the one so needed and used, man is given to belong

to the coming-to-pass of truth. The granting that sends in one way or

another into revealing is as such the saving power. For the saving power

lets man see and enter mio the h/gbest dignity of hjs essence' {The

Question Concerning Technology, 32). Curiously, this is to return philoso­

phy to the medieval modes of the Book of Nature. That is, through reading

and exegesis of this book, one discovers the author, 'Being,' God

Is It ironic that pietistica/ly inclined pheno­

menology, gnostic or agnostic, should retrieve

medieval modes of etymology and exegesis?

'Revealing' is an awareness of potencies, seen through the obscuring

curiam of things ( m-act) - thanks to the sensibilities afforded us by the

electric ground of acoustic space. This obscuring of Bemg. of potency, of

the Real, Heidegger calls 'nihilism.'

27 'Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its

way' I The Question, 25).

65 Proteus Unbound

The essence ot nihilism lies in history; accordingly, in the appearing of

whatever is as such, in its entirety. Nothing is befalling Being itself and its

truth, and indeed m such a way that the truth of what is as such passes for

Being, because ihe truth oi Being remains wanting ... then metaphysics

as the history of the truth of what is as such, is, in its essence, nihilism.

(The Question Concerning Technology. 109)

In other words, visual space and visual bias, with abstract metaphysics as

their outcome, have been nihilistic in cutting us off from awareness of

ground, of Being as the ground of all that is. However, as Erich Fromm

pointed out in The Anatomy of Human Desuuctiveness, the interior^ation

of any technology or technique is itself a form of nihilism 2 G In dissolving the

separation between inner and outer wor ld, in turning us inward, the new

ground of acoustic awareness turns the 'outer wor ld' (no longer 'out there )

into an obsolete figment of the imagination. It would be well to bear in mind

the observation of Wyndham Lewis about the man who is in harmony wi th

his technologies - 'the well-adjusted man is a robot' - his humanity has

been put off and he is a servo-mechanism only. Reviewing the penetrative

and configuring power of the new ground of Gutenberg technology.

Alexander Pope cautioned his readers not to be distracted by mere

'content' obsession and the practical benefits of applied knowledge He

says, in a note to the Dunctad, Book ML 1 337: 'Do not gontle reader, rest

too secure in thy contempt of the Instruments for such a revolution m

learning, or despise such weak agents as have been described in our poem,

but remember what the Dutch stories somewhere relate, that a great part

of their Provinces was once overflow'd by a small opening made in one of

their dykes by a single Water-Rat/

This chapter has reviewed the alphabet and its effects in creating a ground

of visual stress that transformed the society and intellects of Greece,

creating the West as characterized by individualism and abstract conceptu­

al schemes In the present section, we have touched upon some aspects of

science, literature, and philosophy to indicate how the same formal

patterns of awareness have now penetrated all aspects of twentieth-

century existence in the West, plunging us back into the acoustic and

28 Erich Fromm r The Anaxomyof Human DestrucVvenesb. 380ff For example For the new

man. 'The world becomes a sum lifeless artifacts; from synthetic ' O O G to synthetic

organs, the whole man becomes part of rhe total machinery thar he controls and is

simultaneously controlled by He has no plan, no goal for life, except doing what the Jofjit o'

technique determines him to do He aspires to make robots as one of the greatesl

achievements of his technical nnnd r and some specialists assure us rhat the robot will

hardly be distinguished from livmg men This achievement will not seem so astonishing

when man himsel' is hardly distinguishable from a robot' (page 389 i

66 Laws of Media

rnultisensory matrix of sensibility common both to the East and to

preliterate Greece. Under present circumstances, the usual and accepted

theories of communication of Western Science - Old Science - are power­

less to provide any understanding of electric technologies. This leads us

straight on to a consideration of recent discoveries in neurology, to the

formal patterns of Eastern and oral cultures in relation to our own, and to

the tetradic l aws of the media' as providing a theory of communications

that bridges ancient and modern phases of Western culture.

2

CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION: The Two Hemispheres

To the Inuit, truth is given, not by 'seeing is believing/ but through oral

tradition, mysticism, intuition, all cognition - in other words, not simply by

observation and measurement of physical phenomena. To the Inuit, the

ocularly visible apparition is not clearly so common as the purely auditory

one; 'hearer' would be a better name than 'seer' for their holy men.

Robert J Trotter, writ ing on The Other Hemisphere' in Science News,^

reports an investigation of brain-hemisphere dominance and patterns of

behaviour 'among the Inuit or Eskimo people of Baffin Island m north­

eastern Canada/ The project discovered, among the Inuit people, a

language that reflected 'a high degree of spatial, right-hemispheric

orientation Linguistic studies rate it as being the most synthetic of

languages, American English is at the other end of the same scale, and is

rated as the most analytic ileft-hemisphere).' Inuil sculptures, lithographs.

1 KH. Trotter, The Other Hemisphere,' 218. The chart on the next page is taken from this

article.

68 Laws of Media

Left Hemisphere iRight side of body)

Right Hemisphere fLeft sidcofhody)

Speech/Verbal Spatial!Musical

Sequential Ordering"— Simultaneous Comprehension

Perception of Significant Order Perception of Abstract Patterns

Complex Motor Sequences Recognition of Complex Figures

Reproduced courtesy o1 R.H. Trotter

and tapestries are 'without apparent linear or three-dimensional analytic

orientation.' That is, they have never developed any measure of visual bias

such as is normal to Western culture

To the Inuit, nature's forms 'he hidden' until man reveals them one by

one. Their language makes little distinction between 'nouns' and 'verbs',

rather, all words are forms of the verb 'to be,' which is itself lacking in

Eskimo 'Eskimo isn't a nominal language, it doesn'i name ihjngs wh i ch

already exist, but brings things/action (nouns/verbs) into being as it goes

along ... when the mother is in labor, an old woman stands around and says

as many different eligible names as she can think of. The child comes out of

the womb when its name is called' (Edmund Carpenter Eskimo Realities,

In the beginning was the word. The primitive is a phenomenologist who

equates reading aloud the Boole of Nature with the making process As a

man speaks, his language is in a state of birth, as is also the thing about

which he is talking. Such parentage confers responsibilities. In this sense

every man is artist. Primitives have no need, as we have, of a special and

unique group (artists) that uses special processes and perceptions

Carvings are often discarded after being made, just a 'words fade away'

'When Orpingalic says, "And we wil l fear to use words," he doesn't mean

39).

69 Culture and Communication

he's afraid of the words themselves. He means he's in awe of their power

to bring the universe into existence. Words must "shoot up of them­

selves." They must arise naturally out of experience. To impose words of

his own would be sacrilegious. "Many are the words that rush over me H like

the wings of birds out of darkness"' {Eskimo Realities, 52).

Prior to writing and to print, words and utterances were still endowed

with the magical power to form and transform existence. The difference

between the two states is clearly reflected in the hemispheric differences

in the brain. Trotter's chart of the characteristics of the left and right

hemispheres presents a pattern of basic contrasts 2 Because the dominant

feature of the left hemisphere is linearity and sequentially, there are good

reasons for calling it the'visual'(quantitative) side of the brain; and because

the dominant features of the right hemisphere are the simultaneous,

holistic, and synthetic, there are good reasons for indicating it as the

'acoustic' (qualitative) side of the brain.

We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.

Visual space is the result of left-hemisphere dominance in a culture, and its

use is restricted to those cultures that have immersed themselves in the

phonetic alphabet and thereby suppressed the activity of the right

hemisphere.

2 The chart reflects the scientific understanding of the cortical hemispheres, gamed mainly

in the last twenty years. The cortex of the ordinary human brain has two hemispheres,

joined by a massive bundle of fibres called the corpus caliosum, which seems to be the

agency of dialog ue bet we en the hemispheres It was only in the 1950s that these forebrain

commissures in man were first deliberately severed, allowing the hemispheres to be

studied independently. 'The first important finding was that the internemisphenc

exchange of information was totally disrupted iollowing commissurotomy The effect was

such that visual, tactual, proprioceptive, auditory, and olfactory information presented to

one hemisphere could be processed and dealt with in that half-brain, but each of these

activities went on outside the realm of awareness of the other half-cerebrum Th's

observation confirmed the animal work done earlier by Myers and Sperry, except that <n a

sense the results were more dramatic Since it is the left hemisphere that normally

possesses the natural language and speech mechanisms, all processes ongoing in the left

hemisphere could eas<ly be verbally described by the patients, information presented to

The right hemisphere went undescribed' {Michael S Gazzaniga, 'Review of the Split Bra n,'

91) In subsequent tests of patients that had undergone commissurotomy, the comple­

mentarity of the two hemispheres became increasingly evident Most surprising was

the range of activities proper to the right hemisphere, which in the nineteenth century

carried the label of 'minor' or'quiet,' So complete was our culture's visual bias at that time,

it was seriously proposed that the right hemisphere made no contribution to numan

intellection or activity

70 Laws of Media

Since, as Jeremy Campbell points out in Grammatical Man,3 alphabetic

consonants and much of syntax are products of the left hemisphere, visual

space is an extrapolation into the environment of the left brain in high

definition - abstract, structured as a figure minus a ground. Acoustic space

has the basic character of a dynamic sphere whose focus or centre is

simultaneously everywhere and whose margin or periphery is nowhere.

As it is multisensory, involving both the interval of tactility and kinetic

equilibrium-pressure, it is one of the many figure/ground right-hemisphere

forms of space. Ordinarily, the two hemispheres are in constant dialogue

through the corpus caiiosum, and each hemisphere uses the other as its

ground except when one (Le., the left) is habitually dominant. Each

hemisphere, as it were, provides a particular type of information processing

less available to the other. As Dr J.E. Bogen notes, 'the type of cognition

proper to the right hemisphere has been called appositionai a usage

parallel to the common use by neurologists of propositional to encompass

the left hemisphere's dominance for speaking, writ ing, calculation and

related tasks." 1

The individual features of the face, as isolated figures, are easily noted

by the left hemisphere, which cannot handle them together as a pattern. It

is the 'acoustic' power of simultaneous comprehension that gives the right

hemisphere the ability to recognize faces. By the same token, the sense of

touch creates the space of the 'resonant interval': interval defines the

relation of figure to ground and provides the structure, the con-figuration of

ground. Synesthetic interplay among all the senses would seem to relate

mainly to the right hemisphere. That Trotter, in 'The Other Hemisphere,'

selects a Third World or non-literate society for observation and illustration

points to the fact that societies that have not developed the use of the

phonetic alphabet tend to adopt the same Third World posture. While the

Third World is mainly oral/aural, even when it cultivates some non-phonetic

form of writ ing such as Sanskrit, the First World (Western) countries tend

to be visual (left hemisphere), even when most of their population is

declining into a semi-literate state via the information environment of

electronic technologies.

3 Page 244: 'It is well known that the right brain is poor at comprehending consonants and

does not do well at syntax, which is the left brain's special province. How tar this is a sheer

absence of function, and howfant is an effect of the left brain inhibiting the right across tne

corpus caiiosum is still not clear.' If the right brain cannot even handle consonants they

must have had their genesis rn the left brain this adds point to the mystery of what it was

that urged the Greeks to invent them in the first place

4 Joseph E. Bogen. 'Some Educational Implications of Hemispheric Specialization.' 138

Bogen observes further: 'What distinguished hemispheric specialization is not so much

certain kinds of material \e g words for the left, faces for the right) but the way in wh'Ch The

material is processed In other words, hemispheric differences are more usefully

considered in terms of process specificity rather than material specificity '

71 Culture and Communication

Technologies themselves, regardless of content,

produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

Herbert Krugman performed brain-wave studies, comparing the response

of subjects to print and television. One subject was reading a book as the™

came on. As soon as she looked upH her brain waves slowed significantly.

In less than two minutes, she was in a predominantly alpha state - relaxed,

passive, unfocused. Her brain wave response to three different types of rv

content was basically the same, even though she told Krugman she liked'

one, 'disliked' another, and 'was bored by' the third As a result of a series

of such experiments, Krugman argues that this predominantly alpha state is

characteristic of how people respond to TV- any TV. He recently remarked, Jthe ability of respondents to show high right brain response to even

familiar logos, their right brain response to stories even before the idea

content has been added to them, the predominantly right brain response to

TV, and perhaps even to what we call print advertising - all suggests that m

contrast to teaching, the unique power of the electronic media is to shape

the content of people's imagery, and in that particular way determine their

behavior and their views '°

Krugman's investigations were, he admitted, initially undertaken to

disprove that 'the medium is the message.' His quantitative results point to

the massive and subliminal erosion of our culture through right-hemisphere

indoctrination by TV in all its forms, including VCRS, video games, computer

monitors, and word-processors In a wider sense, all electric media, as a

new ground, give salience only to the right hemisphere There is no way to

quantify the right hemisphere, w h i c h emphasizes inner and qualitative

aspects of experience.

How paradoxical that the hardware channels of radio and telephonic

communication contribute to an extraordinary software effect. Nathaniel

Hawthorne was particularly sensitive to the implications of electric

information and not infrequently remarked on them, as in The House of the

Seven Gabies: ' Is it a fact that. . by means of electricity the world of matter

has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless

point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct wi th

intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, and no longer the

5 Herbert Krugman, from a paper delivered to the annual conference of the Advertising

Research Foundation, October 1978 Cf also, Barry Siegel. 'S'av Tuned 'or How TV

Scrambles Your Brain,' in The Miami Herald, C1Q Krugman's original report was presented

as a paper to the annual conference M 970) of the American Association for Public Opinion

Research.

72 Laws of Media

substance which we deemed it!' When people are on the telephone or on

the air, they have no physical bodies but are translated into abstract images.

Their old physical beings are entirely irrelevant to the new situations. The

discarnate user of electric media bypasses all former spatial restrictions

and is present in many places simultaneously as a disembodied intelli­

gence. This puts him one step above angels, who can only be in one place

at a t ime. Since, however, discarnate man has no relation to natural law

(or to Western lineality), his impulse is towards anarchy and lawlessness.

Minus his body, the user of telephone or radio or TV also is minus his

private identity, an effect that is becoming increasingly evident.

In another experiment, an audience was equally divided, wi th each half

seated facing a translucent-opaque screen placed in the middle of a room.

A movie was shown, and then the audience was asked to write a brief

response. One group saw light reflected from the screen in the usual

manner; the other group saw light passing through the screen, as with

television. In their remarks, the 'light-on r group adopted an objective,

detached tone, and was analytic as to narrative, continuity, cinematog­

raphy, editing and workmanship, and so on Whereas they reported 'how

the movie looked/ by contrast, the 'light-through' group was mainly

concerned wi th 'how the movie fe l t/ Their responses were subjective and

emotional: they discussed themselves, how they felt, and the mystical or

archetypal significance of characters or actions. The differences between

the light-on and the light-through situations (immediate ground) were

sufficiently potent to cause one group to have a right-hemisphere

experience and the other to have a left-hemisphere experience. With the

low-intensity mosaic TV image, this effect is greatly amplified.

Cultural dominance by either the left or the

right hemisphere is largely dependent upon

environmental factors.

The lineality of the left hemisphere is supported by an alphabet-based

service environment of roads and transportation, and by logical or rational

activities in social and legal administration. Dominance of the right

hemisphere, however, depends upon a cultural milieu or environment of a

simultaneous resonating character. Such dominance is normal in oral

societies, and today our universal environment of simultaneous electric

information has entirely subverted the dominance of the left hemisphere.

By tuning in on the new audile-tactile awareness made available by our

73 Culture and Communication

electric ground, Fritjof Capra found that modern physics was, unwittingly,

retrieving a world-view harmonious wi th ancient Eastern wisdom. His

problems in reconciling the two were entirely those of the hemispheres:

I had gone through a long training in theoretical physics and had done several

years of research At the same time, I had become very interested in Eastern

mysticism and had begun to see the parallels to modern physics I was

particularly attracted to the puzzling aspects of Zen, which reminded me

of the puzzles in quantum theory. At first, however, relating the two was a

purely intellectual exercise. To overcome the gap between rational, ana­

lytical thinking and the meditation experience of mystical truth, was, and still

is, very difficult for me [The Tao of Physics, 9-10)

The alphabet created visual space, and wi th it a lineal and visual 'outer

world' environment of services and experiences (everything from architec­

ture and highways to representational art), which contributed to the

ascendancy or dominance of the left, or lineal, hemisphere. This observa­

tion is consistent with the findings of the Russian neurophysiology A.K

Luria, who found that the area of the brain which controls linear

sequencing, and, hence, mathematical and scientific thinking, is located in

the pre frontal region of the left hemisphere 1 'The mental process for

writing a word entails still another specialization: putting the letters in the

proper sequence to form the word Lashley discovered many years ago

that sequential analysis involved a zone of the brain different from that

employed for spatial analysis In the course of our extensive studies we

have located the region responsible for sequential analysis in the anterior

regions of the left hemisphere' ('The Functional Organization of the Brain/

71-2). Luria's results show that the expression 'linear thinking' is not

merely a figure of speech, but a mode of activity peculiar to the left

hemisphere of the brain. His results support the observation that the use of

the alphabet, with its emphasis on linear sequence, stimulates dominance

of this area of the brain in cultural patterns.

Luria's observations provide an understanding of how the written

alphabet, with its lineal structure, was able to create conditions conducive

to the development of Western science, technology, and rationality. Many

left-hemisphere stroke patients become aphasic, losing some or all of their

ability to speak or to write, in some cases also losing the capacity for

sustained (sequential) thought. They seem to become 'astonied' (fifteenth-

century English], or 'stunned' - the experience is not unlike being 'stoned'

on drugs. In part, this may be the result of a loss of muscular motor control.

But much of it is directly related to the inner-outer split between the

hemispheres and to linearity as a feature of the left side of the brain.

Speech and writing have to be uttered, in a sequence . Just as all forms of

sequential activity (as contrasted to configuration or pattern) are functions

74 Laws of Media

of the left hemisphere, so too all forms of utterances (and artefacts),

whether technological or verbal or wr i t ten, are functions of the left

hemisphere. This extends to private identity - uttering the self as frag­

mented and abstracted from the group - and to entrepreneurial aggression

of all kinds. Conversely, all technologies that emphasize the outer or the

abstract or sequent ia l ly in organizing experience, contribute to left-

hemisphere dominance in a culture. Harold Innis remarked on the Oriental

(right-hemisphere) antipathy to sequence and abstraction and our sort of

precision:

Social time, for example, has been described as qualitatively differentiated

according to the beliefs and customs common to a group and as not

continuous but as subject to interruption of actual dates. It is influenced by

language which constrains and fixes prevalent concepts and modes of

thought. It has been argued by Marcel Granet that the Chinese are not

equipped to note concepts or to present doctrines discursively The Word

does not fix a notion with a definite degree of abstraction or generality but

evokes an indefinite complex or particular images. It 15 completely unsuited

to formal precision. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived time

proceeds by cycles and is round. [The Bias of Communication, 62)

Dr Bogen noted, appositely, 'what may well be the most important

distinction between the left and right hemisphere modes is the extent to

which a linear concept of t ime participates in the ordering of thought' I The

Human Brain, 141).

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet to

translate other languages into itself is part of its

power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

Tribal, right-hemisphere 'closed' cultures are holistic and entire and

resistant to penetration by other preliterate cultures. But the specialist

qualities of the left-hemisphere phonetic alphabet have long provided the

only means of invading and taking over oral societies. 'Propaganda cannot

succeed where people have no trace of Western culture/ These words of

Jacques Ellul in Propaganda draw attention to one of the crucial features of

Western history. It is no accident that the Christian church, dedicated to

propaganda and propagation, adopted Graeco-Roman phonetic literacy

from the earliest days. The impact of alphabetic literacy is strong enough

not only to break the tribal bond, but to create individualized (left-

75 Culture and Communicat ion

hem isphe re ) c o n s c i o u s n e s s a s we l l . P h o n e t i c l i t e racy - our a l p habe t -

alone has th is p o w e r

The s p r e ad of G r a e c o - R o m a n l i t e racy a n d c iv i l i zat ion b e c a m e i nsepa r ­

able f rom Ch r i s t i an m i s s i o n a r y a n d e d u c a t i o n a l act iv i ty . Pa radox i ca l l y ,

people a re not on ly u nab l e to r e c e i v e , but a r e u n a b l e to re ta in doc t r i na l

teach ing w i t hou t a m i n i m u m of p h o n e t i c or W e s t e r n cu l t u re . H e r e is t h e

observat ion of El lul o n th is ma t t e r .

In addition to a certain living standard, another condit ion must be met : if a

man is to be successfu l l y propagandized, he needs at least a min imum of

culture. Propaganda cannot succeed whe re people have no trace of Weste rn

culture. We are not speak ing here of intel l igence; s o m e primitive tr ibes are

surely intelligent, but have an intel l igence foreign to our concep t s and

customs. A base is needed - for example, educat ion; a man who cannot

read will escape propaganda, as will a man who is not interested m

reading. People used to think that learning to read ev idenced human pro­

gress; they still celebrate the decl ine of illiteracy as a great victory: they

condemn countries wi th a large proportion of il l iterates: they think that

reading is a road to f reedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing

is not to be able to read, but to understand wha t one reads, to reflect on and

judge what one reads. Outs ide of that, reading has no mean ing (and even

destroys certain automatic qualit ies of memo r y and observat ion). But to talk

about critical facult ies and d isce rnment is to talk about someth ing far

above primary educat ion and to cons ide r a very smal l minority. The vast

majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but they do

not exercise their intel l igence beyond this. They attribute authority and emi­

nent value to the printed word, or, converse ly, reject it altogether. A s

these people do not p o s s e s s enough knowledge to reflect and d iscern, they

believe - or disbel ieve - in toto what they read. And as such people,

moreover, will se lec t the eas ies t , not the hardest, reading matter, they are

precisely on the level at wh ich the printed word can se ize and conv ince

them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda. 6

The d o m i n a n c e of t h e left h e m i s p h e r e (ana ly t ic a n d quan t i ta t i ve ) en t a i l s

the s u bm i s s i o n or s u p p r e s s i o n of t h e r ight h e m i s p h e r e ; a n d s o , for

example, our i n t e l l i gence t e s t s e x i s t on l y fo r m e a s u r i n g l e f t - hem i sphe r e

ach i e vemen t , a n d t a ke no c o g n i z a n c e of t h e e x i s t e n c e of t h e (qual i tat ive)

right h em i s p he r e .

6 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda. The Formation of Men's Attitudes, 108-9 Harold Innis

comments on the moment of transition: 'For a brief period the Greeks escaped from the

oral tradition and the written tradition The oral tradition was sufficiently strong to check

complete submergence in the written. The oral tradition supported Greek skepticism and

evaded monopolies of religious literature' (The Bias of Communication, 111)

76 Laws of Media

The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist

The present electronic age, in its inescapable evocation of simultaneity,

presents the first serious threat to the 2500-year dominance of the left

hemisphere It is no surprise that students whose right brains have had

eighteen years' education by rv have problems with left-brain curricula and

SAr tests

The current spate of dyslexia and other reading difficult ies- some 90 per

cent of the victims are males - is a direct result of T V and other electric

media pressuring us into returning to the right hemisphere. Dyslexia is an

inability to adopt a single, fixed point of v iew wi th respect to all letters and

words: conversely, it consists of approaching letters and words from many

points of view simultaneously (right-hemisphere fashion), minus the

assumption that any one way is solely correct. As the pressure continues,

so will the problems wi th our left-hemisphere alphabet The cubists, as

artists and 'antennae of the race,' detected the shift some seventy years

ago, and explored the grammar of this sensory modality If literacy is to

survive for another generation in the West, our writ ing system wil l soon

have to be completely recast in a mould congenial to right-hemisphere

sensibility and satisfactions. We might, for example, replace it with a

syllabary of fifty to seventy characters

A variety of factors can give salience or dominance either to the

right (simultaneous and acoustic) hemisphere of the brain, or to the left

(lineal and visual). But no matter how extreme the dominance of either

hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of

interplay, thanks to the corpus caHosurn. that part of the nervous system

which bridges the hemispheres. Even the Chinese with their traditionally

monopolistic cultivation of the right hemisphere, which invests every

aspect of their lives, their language, and their writ ing with artistic delicacy -

even the Chinese exert much left-hemisphere stress through their

practicality and their concern with moral wisdom. However, their sensory

stress falls heavily on what Heisenberg calls the 'resonant interval,' that is,

touch.

Indeed the use of space is one of the Chinese painter's most coveted

secrets, one of the first thoughts in his head when he begins to plan his

composition. Almost every space in our pictures has a significance the

onlooker may fill them up with his own imagined memory or with feeling

merely There was a Chinese poet of the Sung dynasty, Yeh Ch'ing Ch'en,

who wrote the sorrows of a parting and described the scene as follows1

77 Culture and Communication

Of the three parts Spring scene, two are sadness.

And other part is nothing but wind and rain

Who would venture to paint this scenery, but yet who would deny the truth

of it? This is what we leave to the well-disposed blank, more eloquent

than pictorial expression. (Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye, 189-90)

The Chinese, in other words, use the eye as an ear, creating the paradoxical

situation that Tony Schwartz notes in The Responsive Chord apropos therv

image; 'In watching television, our eyes function like our ears.'

The interval between the wheel and the axle has long served as an

example not only of 'touch,'but of 'p lay/Without 'p lay, 'wi thout that figure/

ground interval, there is neither wheel nor axle. The space between the

wheel and the axle, which defines both, is 'where the action is'; and this

space is both audile and tactile.

The Chinese use the intervals between things

as the primary means of getting 'in touch'

with situations.

Nothing could be more expressive than this statement of the properties of

the right hemisphere in contrast to the left For, to the left hemisphere, the

interval is a space that must be iogicdlly connected and filled and bridged.

Such is the dictate of lineality and visual order in contrast to the resonating

interval or gap of the simultaneous world of the right hemisphere. In The

Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo explains the Japanese attitude to social

relationships as a 'constant readjustment to our surroundings.' This is in

extreme contrast to the Western or visual 'point of view,' which assumes a

fixed position from which to examine each situation and to assert one's

preference. Right-hemisphere culture has no place for the private indi­

vidual, just as the left-hemisphere society regards tribal groups as sinister

and threatening (remember the 'Yellow Peril'),

Suzuki, the great authority on Zen Buddhism, describes muga as 'ecstasy

with no sense of / am doing rt,' 'effortlessness/ The 'observing self is

eliminated; a man 'loses himself,' that is, he ceases to be a spectator of his

acts. Suzuki says: 'With the awaking of consciousness, the will is split

into two: ... actor and observer Conflict is inevitable, for the actor (-self)

wants to be free from the limitations' of the observer-self. Therefore in

Enlightenment the disciple discovers that there is no observer-self, ' no soul

78 Laws of Media

entity as an unknown or unknowable quantity ' Nothing remains but the

goal-and-the-act that accomplishes it. (Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum

and the Sword, 247-8)

The right-hemisphere culture has a great affinity for the simultaneity of the

age of electric information, as Okakura Kakuzo explains. 'The Present is the

moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks

Adjustment: Adjustment is Art, The art of life lies in a constant readjust­

ment to our surroundings' {The Book of Tea. 44).

The right-hemisphere culture naturally seeks to 'tune' or reconfigure

intervals rather than to 'connect' situations and relationships:

The Taoists claimed that the comedy of life could be made more interesting

if everyone would preserve the unities. To keep the proportion of things

and give place to others without losing one's own position was the secret of

success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order

to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must never be lost in that

of the individual. This Laotse illustrates by his favourite metaphor of the

Vacuum. He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential The reality

of a room, for instance, was to be found in vacant space enclosed by the

roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves The usefulness of a

water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in

the form of the pitcher or the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all

potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible

{The Book of Tea, 44-5)

Kakuzo adds: 'In Jiu-jitsu one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy's

strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one's own strength

for victory in the final struggle.' In Western art, however, we admire the

power of statement and the 'bounding line' in design, whereas the right-

hemisphere culture gives play to the opposite principle; instead of state­

ment, the stress is on 'the value of suggestion'. 'In art the importance

of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion In leaving

something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and

thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to

become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up to

the full measure of your aesthetic emotion' {The Book of Tea, 46].

This is of the same order as the preliterate Greek technigue of mimesis,

discussed earlier, By contrast, Wyndham Lewis, in Men without Art,

maintains that the role of the artist is to prevent our becoming adjusted,

since To individualized Western society the Protean 'well-adjusted man' is

an impercipient robot.

Julian Jaynes proposed that the preliterate Homeric hero had 'no

subjective consciousness, no mind, soul, or wi l l '

79 Culture and Communication

lliadic man did not have subjectivity as do we, he had no awareness of his

awareness, no internal mind-space to introspect upon. In distinction to

our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myc-

eneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with

no consciousness whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar

language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar fnend or authority

figure or 'god,' or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these

hallucinated voices because he could not 'see' what to do by himself.

{The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 75)

The culture-heroes of prellteracy and

postliteracy alike are robots.

'Robotism' for those with writing means the suppression of the conscious

'observer'self or conscience so as to remove all fear and curcumspection,

all encumbrances to ideal performance. Such a man 'becomes as the dead,

who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper

course of action. The dead are no longer returning on, they are free.

Therefore to say Jl will live as one already dead' means a supreme release

from conflict/7 The Japanese use 'living as one already dead' to mean that

one lives on the plane of expertness. As W.B. Yeats noted in 'Byzantium,' it

creates the superman:

I hail the superman,

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

It entails the extinction of the left-hemisphere detached and objective self

If the result resembles detachment, it is from pushing the right hemisphere

all the way, to the point of reversal of apparent characteristics. As Ruth

Benedict remarks, 'it is used in common, everyday exhortation. To

encourage a boy who is worrying about his final examinations from middle

school, a man will say, "Take them as one already dead and you will pass

them easily." To encourage someone who is undertaking an important

business deal a friend will say, "Be as one already dead." When a man

goes through a great soul crisis and cannot see his way ahead, he quite

commonly emerges with the resolve to live "as one already dead" ' (page

249). She continues;

7 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 249. 'On' is an obligation passively incurred (cf. page 116)

80 L a w s of Med'd

It points up vividly the difference between Western and Eastern psychology

that when we speak of a conscienceless American we mean a man who

no longer feels the sense of s in which should accompany wrongdoing, but

that when a Japanese uses the equivalent phrase he means a man who

is no longer tense and hindered. The American means a bad man, the

Japanese means a good man, a trained man, a man able to use his

abilities to the utmost He means a man who can perform the most difficult

and devoted deeds of unselfishness The great Ame r i can sanction for

good behavior is guilt; a man who because of a calloused conscience can no

longer feel this has become antisocial. The Japanese diagram the prob­

lem differently According to their philosophy man in his inmost soul is good

If his impulse can be directly embodied m his deed, he acts virtuously and

easily. Therefore, he undergoes, in 'expertness,' self-training to eliminate

the self-censorship of shame (haji). Only then is his 'sixth sense' free of

hindrance. It is his supreme release from self-consciousness and conflict

tpage 251J

The paradox today is that the ground of the latest Western technologies

is electronic and simultaneous, and thus is structurally right-hemisphere

and 'Oriental' and oral in its nature and effects This situation began with

the telegraph more than a century ago. Still, the overwhelming pattern of

procedures in the Western wor ld remains lineal, sequential, and connected

in political and legal institutions, and also in education and commerce, but

not in entertainment or art A formula for complete chaos'

The ground of the Oriental right-hemisphere world, meantime, is rapidly

acquiring some of the hardware connectedness of the left-hemisphere

Western wor ld China has recently embarked on a program of alphabetic

literacy, which will result in then acquiring a completely left-hemisphere

cultural bias, plunging them into a new phase of individualized enterprise

and aggression, for which they are already developing a ground of industrial

hardware. In general, it needs to be noted that left-hemisphere man has

very JittJe power to observe or to control environments, or to see the

patterns of change.

The effects of the alphabet are well-known and by now quite predictable

as we have seen them enacted in a variety of cultures and periods. But one

thing is different about the modern Chinese courtship of the alphabet the

speed. It took many centuries for the alphabet to suppress the right

hemisphere and the mimetic tribal bonds of the Greeks and to release the

focused energy of the visual left hemisphere, for the technology had to

filter up from the working and merchant classes to the aristocracy. With the

Romans, too, generally only the slaves were alphabetic, and again the

outward urge and thrust took some time to gather momentum: when the

t ime was ripe - the ground was sufficient - the Alexander or Caesar

appeared China now promises fair to accomplish the same dissemination

81 Culture and Communication

in a generation or so The question remains whether phonetic literacy will

be powerful enough to dislodge their residue of right-brain habitude,

backed as it is by the new range of electronic gimmicks and media.

Left-hemisphere industrialism has blinded the

Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern

recognition is in the right hemisphere.

The Oriental tradition reflects a particular attunement to all facets of

ground, and immediate responsiveness to changes in ground configura­

tion. Oral peoples are notoriously conservative about new technologies

because of their sensitivity to the side-effects involved - the new ground

they bring into play - and theirs are histories of rejections of innovations.

We tend to adopt anything that promises immediate efficiency or profit,

and to ignore all side-effects. We pride ourselves on our uniform

consistency. It is his sensitivity to ground, plus a strong sense of decorum

(propriety) and a lack of private identity that enables an Oriental to change

his behaviour instantly from one pattern to another For example, until

August 1945, the J chu r code of loyalty demanded of the Japanese people

that they fight to the last man against the enemy. When the emperor

changed the requirements of J chu' by broadcasting Japan's capitulation,

the Japanese outdid themselves in expressing their co-operation with the

victors.

Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from

one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities

are not included in our experience Yet in Japanese life the contradictions,

as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our

uniformities are in ours. It is especially important for Occidentals to recog­

nize that the 'circles' into which the Japanese divide life do not include

any 'circle of evil/ This is not to say that the Japanese do not recognize bad

behavior, but they do not see human life as a stage on which forces of

good contend with forces of eviL They see existence as a drama which calls

for careful balancing of the claims of one circle' against another and of

one course of procedure against another, each circle and each course of

procedure being in itself good (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,

197)

Instead of an abstract, uniform (visual) code of conduct applicable to all

situations (as a figure minus a ground], there is rather an equilibrium of

properties that requires constant attunement.

82 Laws of Media

In his book Out of Revolution, Eugen Posenstock-Huessy explains how

the figure of Western capitalism has persisted in a program of advance by

environmental destruction, wi thout any policy of replacement of such

(environmental) ground. By contrast, the right-hemisphere man r like the

primitive hunter, is always intensely aware of ground, and in fact prefers

ground and the experience of participation in ground to detached con­

templation of figures.

Chiang Yee points to the rejection of (visual! matching and representa­

tion in Chinese art: 'Verisimilitude is never a first object; it is not the

bamboo in the wind that we are representing but all the thought and

emotion in the painter's mind at a given instant when he looked upon a

bamboo spray and suddenly identified his life with it for a moment 1 {The

Chinese Eye, 114). He further notes, 'we try, in the steps of the Sages, to

lose ourselves in Great Nature, to identify ourselves wi th her. And so in

landscapes, in the paintings of flowers and birds, we try not to imitate the

form, but to extract the essential feeling of the living object, having first

become engulfed in the general life Stream' (page 115) The Oriental aspires

not merely to love and understand a painting itself, but to probe for a

meaning far beyond its confines in a world of the spirit. On these

right-hemisphere terms, figure painting is a peculiar Western preoccupa­

tion that is devoid of satisfaction. 'We have never elevated figure-painting

as you have in the West, some of it may have a religious significance, but it

seldom reaches the depths of thought which landscape attains' (page 115)

It was the dominance of the left hemisphere by means of the civilizing

stream of phonetic literacy that evoked in Western man the ability to detach

himself f rom participation in his surroundings. His program to conquer

nature is but one result of the enormous psychic and cultural energy

released by that ground of specialist goals.

It is a/ways the psychic and social grounds,

brought into play by each medium or technology,

that readjust the balance of the hemispheres

and of human sensibilities into equilibrium

with those grounds.

The experience of the blind amply illustrates how the shift of any

component in the sensorium creates an entirely new wor ld:

83 Culture and Communication

When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it

made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same

for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left

over from the past. Or why not call them by their name - hallucinations? I

had learned to my cost how wrong they were.

From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take

from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of

hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for

another world, entirely different but entirely coherent, to be born. Another

world? Not really. The same world, rather, but seen from another angle,

and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened, all the

hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the

four winds, not even like theories but hke whims. {And There Was Light,

143-4)

This writer, Jacques Lusseyran, was made particularly aware of the right

hemisphere 'inner' experience afforded by blindness, by having to live in

an 'objective' left-hemisphere culture. Blindness creates the seer much as

the ancient world conceived the seer as blind. 'Blindness works like dope, a

fact we have to reckon with. I don't believe there is a blind man alive who

has not felt the danger of intoxication. Like drugs, blindness heightens

certain sensations, giving sudden and often disturbing sharpness to the

senses of hearing and touch But, most of all, like a drug, it develops inner

as against outer experience, and sometimes to excess' [And There Was

Light, 49(, In our culture the parallel is the caricature of inner or right-

hemisphere awareness experienced by the drug culture of hallucinogenics

that provide an artificial mimesis of the electric information environment.

Francis Bacon's four Idols constitute the basis for a complete theory of

communication in that they account for the various forms of blindness and

ignorance conferred upon self and society by technology and culture alike.

Each results in a transformation of sensibility, as Lusseyran notes. For the

cause (ground or formal cause) of ignorance is knowledge as that of poverty

is wealth; so the form of the blindness is the form or bias of sensibility The

'myth of objectivity,' a result of visual bias, belongs to the 'Idols of the

Theatre' or what Giambattista Vice termed 'the conceit of scholars' in his

fourth axiom. Vico was merely following instructions when, at the outset of

his Scienza Nuova, he set out his 'Elements' or 'axioms,' for Bacon had

prefaced his account of his 'Idols' w i th these words:

The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper

remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To

j

84 L a w s of Med ia

point ihem out, however, JS of great use for the doctrine of idols is to the

interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is

to common logic.6

The Idols of the Tribe, and Vice's first axiom, specify the general bias of

sensibility, such as the suppression of the right hemisphere by the alphabet

or that of the left by radio and TV, as a pollution of exact observation which

must be allowed f o r 9 The Idols of the Cave, and Vico's second axiom,

pinpoint intellectual laziness and conceptual dogmatism as distorting

influences.' 0 The idols of the Marketplace - Vico's 'conceit of nations' -

arise in the 'intercourse and association of men wi th each other,' 1 1 and

8 No^um Organum, Book I, aphorism xl

9 Novum Organum. Book I, aphorism xli 'The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in

human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men For it is a false assertion that the sense

of man is the measure of Things On the conrrary, aff perceptions, as wel l of The sense as o'

the mind, are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure

of the universe And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays

irregularly, distorts and decolors ihe nature of rhinos by mingling its o*vn nature w.Th

it' (page 3). Vico's first axiom is this: '120 Because of the indefinite nature of the human

mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of all tnings

121 This axiom explains those two common human traits, on ihe one hand thai rumor

grows in its course [f&ma cresctt eundo). on ihe other that rumor is deflated bv [he

presence (of the thing itself] [mmuitpraesentia famam). In the long course that rumor

has run from ihe beginning of the world it has been the perennial source of all the

exaggerated opinions which have hitherto been held concerning remote antiquities

unknown to us, by virtue of that property of the human mind noted by Tacitus in his Life

of Agncola, where he says that everything unknown is taken ( ar something great

\omne ignotumpro magnified esr)' (The Wew Science of Giambattisia Vtco 541

10 Navum Organum, Book I, aphorism xhr 'The Idols of the Cave are tne idols of the

individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has

a cave or den of his own. which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing eitner to

his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others, or

to the reading of books, and the authority oMhose whom he esteems and admires or tne

hke So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individ-ualsl is in fact

a thing variable and iul) perturbation, and governed as it were by chance Whence it was

well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and

not in thegreater or common world' (page 35). This Idol takes its name from the cave in the

Republic of Plato (Book VII). Vico notes (axiom two) '122 It is another property of the

human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things they

judge them by what is familiar and at hand. 123. This axiom points to the >nexhaust ble

source of all the errors about the beginnings of humanity that have been adopted by entire

natrons and by a/f the scho/ars For when the former began ;o take nevee o£ them and tne

latter to investigate them, it was on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated and

magnificent times that they judged the origins of humanity, which must nevertheless bv

ihe nature of things have been small, crude and quite obscure' (page 54)

11 Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism xlm 'There are also idols formed by tne 'ritecourse

and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market-place, on account

of the commerce and consort of men there For it is by discourse that men associate.

85 Culture and Communication

are rooted in social and cultural preference and in the bias imposed by

languages and jargons Cleansing these Augean stables is the special task

of the poet. Fourth and last. Bacon cites the Idols of the Theatre 'which

have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philoso­

phies' - Old Science. These Vico terms 'conceit of scholars' whose

sciences have neither real antiquity of knowledge nor knowledge of

antiquity, being cutoff from tradition This conceit shores up its own narrow

version of thought by claiming that what it knows is what all learning has

always been about. 1 2

Western Old Science approaches the study of media in terms of linear,

sequential transportation of data as detached figures (content); the New

Science approach is via the ground of users and of environmental media

effects.

and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar And therefore the ill

andunfairchoiceof words wonderfully obstructs the understanding Nor do The delrn tions

or explanations wherewith m some things learned men are woni to guard and defend

themselves, by any means set the matter right But words pla.nly force and overrule the

understanding, and throw all into confus^n, and lead men away into numberless empty

corrtfovetsies and idle tanc^es' ipage 35* Vico translates this inio h s third axiom as

follows: '125. As for the conceit of the nations, we have heard that golden saving of

DrOdorusSiculus Every nation, according to him, whether Greek or barbar an, has had the

same conceit that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human I feand that us

rememhered history goes back to the very beginning of the world Ipage 55f

12 Novum Qrganufrt. Book I, aphorism xliv Lastly, there are the .d jols wh,ch nave

immigrated Into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also Vom

wrong laws of demonstration These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all

the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own

creation alter an unreal and scenic fashion Mor is it only oi the systems now m vogue, or

only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak, for many itiore plays of the same

kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set *ortb; seeing that errors the

most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neitner again do i

mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and a>ioms m science,

which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received' [page 36) Vico

renders this in his fourth axiom: "127 To this conceit of the nations there may be added

that of the scholars, who will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world 128

This ayjom disposes of all the opinions of the scholars concerning the matchless wisdom

of the ancients ' (page 55) Summing his great chapter on Poetic Wisdom. Vico

reiterates1 '779 We have shown that poetic wisdom justly deserves two great and

sovereign tributes. The one, clearly and constantly accorded to it, is that of having founded

gentile mankind, though the conceit of the nations on the one hand, and that of the

scholars on the other, the former with Jdeas of an empty magnificence and the latter w th

ideas of an impertinent philosophical wisdom, have in effect denied it this honour by the-r

very efforts to affirm it. The other, concerning which a vulgar tradition has come down to

us, is that the wisdom of the ancients made its wise men, by a single aspiration, equally

great as philosophers, lawmakers, c a p i a t , historians orators and poets, on whi»ch

account it has been so greatly sought after' (page 265}

86 Laws of Medía

The Shannon-Weaver model of communication,

the basis of all contemporary Western theories

of media and of communication, typifies

left-brain lineal bias.

It is a kind of pipeline model of a hardware container for software content It

stresses the idea of 'inside' and outside' and assumes that communica­

tion is a kind of literal matching rather than resonant making:

INFORMATION SOURCE TRANSMITTER RECEIVE*! DESTINATION

RECEIVED

NOISE SOURCE

The S h an non-Weaver model of communication

Weaver interprets:

The information source selects a desired message out of a set of possible

messages The selected message may consist of wrmen or spoken

words, or of pictures, music, etc

The transmitter changes this message into the signal which is actually

sent over the communication channel from the transmitter to the receiver.

In the case of telephony, the channel is a wire, the signal a varying

electrical current on this wire, the transmitter is the site of devices (tele­

phone transmuter, etc.} which change the sound pressure of the voice into

the varying electrical current . In oral speech, the information source is

the brain, the transmitter is the voice mechanism producing the varying

sound pressure (the signal) which is transmitted through the a<r (the

channel). In radio, the channel is simply space (or the aether, if any one still

prefers that antiquated and misleading word), and the signal is the elec­

tromagnetic wave which is transmitted.

87 Culture and Communication

The receiver is a son of inverse transmitter, changing the transmitted

signal back into a message, and handing this message on to the desti­

nation ...

In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that

certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the

information source These unwarned additions may be distortions of sound

(in telephony, for example} or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or

shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or

facsimile!, etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called

noise. (Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication.

7-8}

Claude Shannon presents his theory of communication in terms of

left-hemisphere verisimilitude as 'first object': 'The fundamental problem

of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or

approximately a message selected at another point Frequently the

messages have meaning' (page 32). This is to ignore completely the

ground of users and of sensibility. The Shannon-Weaver model and its

descendants provide exact examples of Idols of the Theatre. In point of

fact, the multiplicity of side-effects of any communication system forms an

entire environment of interfacings, a kind of subculture which accompanies

the central 'service' or channel of communication. For example, the

side-effects of the Alaska oil pipeline are the subject of a large report by the

Berger Commission. The gist of this report is that the entire native

population would be deprived of its environmental livelihood, were the

pipeline to be built. In the same way, the side-effects of telephone or radio

assume a complex system of electric technology and supporting services,

the adoption of which serves as a new ground that transforms the entire

user society. Equally, the system of manufacturers and roads and services

that are the side-effect of the motor car alter the entire face (and odour} of

any user-society.

The Shannon-Weaver model and its derivatives

follow the linear pattern of efficient cause - the

only sequential form of causality.

Aristotle provides the earliest systematic treatment of causes, by drawing

together Plato's observations Aristotelian causality is fourfold, and is

applicable both to nature and to artefacts. There are

88 Laws of Media

the material cause (the scholastic causa matenahs), which provided the

passive receptacle on which the remaining causes act - and which 15 anything except the matter of modern science, the formal cause (causa

formaiis), wh i ch contributed the essence, idea, or quality of the thing

concerned, the motive force or efficient cause [causa efficiens), that is, the

external compulsion that bodies had to obey; and the final cause [causa

fmalts) was the goal to which everything strove and which everything served ' 1 >

The first two were generally regarded as related to being (right

hemisphere), the last two to becoming (left hemisphere). As George

Steiner points out. 1 Much of Greek drama and of the Greek theory of history

is founded on the tensions which occur between realized necessity and

meaningful action' - that is, between Formal and Efficient Causes Formal

Cause, which sends the effects ahead of the cause, found express/on m

Greek tragedy as Fate, or fateful necessity. 1 4 This doctrine of simultaneous

causes lasted until the Gutenberg era when print gave complete ascend­

ancy to visual space and modern scientific Method was born. Galileo

reformulated the definition of efficient cause as the necessary and

sufficient condition for the appearance of something: that and no other is

to be called cause, at the presence of which the effect always follows, and

at whose removal the effect disappears '

When visual space transformed cosmology and the logos alike from

resonant ground to ratfona/ figure, the mode of understanding of forma)

causality shifted from dynamic to abstract and ideal, Aristotle retains and

confuses the oral nature of formal cause, which explains why he frequently

confuses formal and final cause. Final cause, inherent in the thing from the

outset, came to be misinterpreted in left-hemisphere terms as the

end-point of a series of efficient causes. Bacon noted, in his New Science,

how visual bias interferes mischievously in the discovery of causes' and

distorts the understanding of final causes in par t icu lar 1 5 Such distortions he

termed 'Idols of the Tribe,' and observed of sensory bias in general that 'the

human understanding is like a false mirror r which, receiving rays irregularly,

distorts and colors the nature of things by mingling its own nature wi th it'

{Novum Organum, Bk. I, xli, 34). Formal cause is usually regarded as the

13 Mario Bunge, Causality The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science. 32 V'de

Metaphysics Bk L ch. m 983a, b. Bk V ch n, and Physics Bk If, ch m and vn

14 George Steiner, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. 149 He illustrates.

'We know what will happen to Agamemnon when he enters the house eacn instant of

the agon has been announced and prepared for We know precisely what Oedipus will

discover - in a crucial sense he Too has known all along Yet witn each narration or

performance of ifte fable our sense of shock JS renewed The tragic vision of Greek

literature turns on this deep paradox- the event rnost expected, most consequent on rhe

internal logic of action, is also the most surprising' (page 149).

15 Novum Qrganum. Book £, aphorism xfvur See, too, hrs remarks in the Advancement of

Learning, Book II, 5 and 7.

89 Culture and Communication

'defining formula' or definition of a thing's essence (its form or the

'whatness' whereby we know a thing). Prior to visual space, formal cause

coincided wi th logos as a figure/ground concern with the thing, structurally

inclusive of its whole pattern of side-effects on the ground of users. 1 f i

In the left hemisphere, however, formal cause is translated into a kind of

Platonic abstract ideal blueprint that is never perfectly realized in any given

material example. Such is the understanding of Northrop Frye, one of the

principal modern exponents of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas as passed

through Freud and Jung. He is consistent in his left-hemisphere approach.

Referring to the Jungian doctrine of archetypes, Wimsatt and Brooks

comment that 'For Northrop Frye the discovery points to the possibility of

turning literary criticism for the first t ime into a true science. No true

science, he argues, can be content to rest in the structural analysis of the

object with which it deals. The poet is only the efficient cause of the poem,

but the poem, having fo rm, has a formal cause that is to be sought. On

examination, Frye finds this formal cause to be the archetype.' ' 7

Frye is adamant on the point:

An original painter knows, of course, that when the public demands likeness

to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite, likeness to the pictorial

conventions it is familiar with Hence when he breaks with these conven­

tions, he is often apt to assert that he is nothing but an eye. that he

merely paints what he sees as he sees it, and the like. His motive in talking

such nonsense is clear enough: he wishes to say that painting is not

merely facile decoration, and involves a difficult conquest of some very real

spatial problems But this may be freely admitted without agreemg that

the formal cause of a picture is outside the picture, an assertion which

would destroy the whole art if it were taken seriously [Anatomy of Criti­

cism. 132).

There is absolutely no provision here for ground of any kind: his archetype

is exactly a figure minus a ground [vide the discussion in From Cliché to

Archetype). Otherwise it would be perfectly natural to observe, wi th the

rhetoricians and grammarians, that the formal cause of the poem, painting,

or whatever is its ground: the audience (the user) and the configuration of

sensibilities in the culture at the time the artefact was produced.

The four causes as a mode of exegesis of nature had been regarded as

parallel to the 'four levels' of interpretation of scripture by medievel

16 Aristotle, Generation of Animáis, xhv, 3. Aristotle opens Book I by presenting formal cause as 'the logos of the thing's essence '

17 W K Wimsatt, Jr and C. Brooks. Literary Cnhcism-A Short History. 7-9 In their footnote, they cite Frye's 'My [Cnticat] Credo,' 91 110, and add1' "Archetype." borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, tne psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, arid thus part of the mnented response-pattern of the race '

90 Laws of Media

grammarians (eg , ST Bonaventure). In each case, the 'fours' were

simultaneous, and both systems were rendered obsolescent by the

Renaissance push into visual space and left-hemisphere dominance.

Figure/ground resonance and the interplay of levels and causes were

eliminated, wi th the further advantage, from the standpo/n! of the modern/.

of cutting all bondage and allegiance to the traditions. Bunge summarizes

the practical left-hemisphere advantages of dumping manifold causality

Some of the grounds for the Renaissance reduction of causes to the causa

efftciens were the following1 (a) it was, of all the four, the sole clearly

conceived one; ib) hence it was mathematically expressible; (c) it could be

assigned an empirical correlate, namely, an event (usually a motion) pro­

ducing another event (usually another motion) in accordance with fixed

rules; the remaining causes, on the other hand, were not definable in empir­

ical terms, hence they were not emprrrcairy testable, id) as a conse­

quence, the efficient cause was controllable, moreover, its control was

regarded as leading to the harnessing of nature, which was the sole aim

of the instrumental ipragmaac} conception of science f Causahiy. 32-2)

Ail Western 'scientific' models of communication

are, like the Shannon-Weaver model, linear,

logical, and sequential in accordance with the

pattern of efficient causality.

These are all in the figure-minus-ground mode of the left hemisphere, and

in contrast do not relate to the effects of simultaneity and discontinuity and

resonance that typify experience in an electronic culture For use in the

18 For over a thousand years, based on the Book of Genesis, the West had propounded a

theory Q1 nature as one of the forms oi Divine revelation There were two book^, me Book

of Nature and the Book of Scripture, parallel texts in different idioms as it were, both

subiect to exegesis Shakespeare frequently alludes to this tradition of multilevel

exegesis, in As Yov Like tu the exiled Duke remarks to his companions, the woods 'are

counselors ••thai f/eetrngfy persuade me what 13m Andirtis our hie. exempt frum pubJ-c

haunt; Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks • Sermons in stores, and good

in everything' (II. 1.10-17} 'The Book of Nature was an encyclopedia of being, only God

spoke m events In the mmds of the Middle Ages every event, even/ case, fictitious or

historic, tends to crystallize, to become a parabfe. an exampfe, a proof, m order Co be

applied as a standing instance of a general moral truth. In the same way every utterance

becomes a dictum, a maxim, a text. For every question of conduct Scripture, legends,

history, literature, furnish a crowd of examples or of types, together making up a sort

of moral clan, to which the matter in question belongs.' J Hutzinga. The Waning of the

Middle Ages, 221).

91 Culture and Communication

electric age, a right-hemisphere model of communication is necessary,

both because our culture has nearly completed the process ot shifting its

cognitive modes from the left to the right hemisphere, and because the

electronic media themselves are right-hemisphere in their patterns and

operation. The problem is to discover such a model that yet is congenial to

Our culture with its residuum of left-hemisphere tradition Such a model

would have to take into account the apposition of both figure and ground

instead of concentrating solely on an abstract sequence or movement

isolated from any ground.

3 For the end which this science of mine proposes is the invention not of arguments

but of arts; not of things in accordance with principles, but of principles them­

selves; not of probable reasons, but of designations and directions for works. And

as the intention is different so, accordingly, is the effect; the effect of the one

[Old Science] to overcome an opponent in argument of the other to command

nature in action.

Francis Bacon, The Great instauration

LAWS OF MEDIA

Sir Karl Popper's (right-brain) statement that a scientific law is one so stated

as to be capable of falsification made it both possible and necessary to

formulate the laws of the media.

All of man's artefacts - whether language, or laws, or ideas and

hypotheses, or tools, or clothing, or computers - are extensions of the

physical human body or the mind. Man the tool-making animal has long

been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a

manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties. But having made

these experiments, men have consistently omit ted to fol low them wi th

observations.

J Z Young, in Doubt and Certainty in Science, notes.

The effect of stimulations, external or internal, is to break up the unison of

action of some part or the whole of the brain. A speculative suggestion is

that the disturbance in some way breaks the unity of the actual pattern that

has been previously built up in the brain. The brain then selects those

features from the input that tend to repair the model and to return the cells

94 Laws of Media

to their regular synchronous beating. 1 cannot pretend to be able to develop

this idea of models m our brain in detail, but it has great possibilities in

showing how we tend to fit ourselves to the world and the worid to

ourselves. In some way the brain initiates sequences of actions that tend TO

return it to its rhythmic pattern, this return being the act of consumma­

tion, or completion It the first action performed fails to do this fails that is to

stop the original disturbance, then other sequences may be tried. The

brain runs through its rules one after another, matching the input with its

various models until somehow unison is achieved This may perhaps only

be after strenuous, varied, and prolonged searching During this random

activity further connexions and action patterns are formed and they in

turn will determine future sequences, (pages 67-8)

The inevitable drive for 'closure,' 'completion,' or equilibrium occurs

with both the suppression and the extension of human sense or function It

was Edward T. Hall who in our time first drew attention to the fact that all

human artefacts are extensions of man, Jn The Silent Language, he wrote

Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to

do with his body The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and

the fist and ends with the atom bomb Clothes and houses are extensions of

man's biological temperature-control mechanisms Furniture takes the

place of squatting and sitting on the ground Power tools, glasses, T V , tele­

phones, and books which carry the voice across both time an.d space are

examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing

labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our

feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as

extensions of what man once d'd w/ih his body or some specialized part

of his body .1

Hans Hass, in The Human Animal, sees this power to create additional

prosthetic organs as 'an enormity f rom the evolutionary standpoint .. an

advance laden w i t h unfathomable consequences' (page 101).

Our taws of media are observations on the operation and effects of

human artefacts on man and society, since a human artefact ' is not merely

an implement tor working upon something, but an extension of our body,

effected by the artificial addition of organs; .. to which, to a greater or

I E.T Hall, The Silent Language. 56-7 However, the notion is of a respectable age Two generations ago, Emerson made the observation, 'The human body is tne magazine of inveniions, the patent office where are the models from which every hint was taken All the Tools and engines on earth are only extensions of Us- limbs and senses One definition ot man is "an intelligence served by organs"' fWorks and Days 15f J

95 Laws of Media

lesser degree, we owe our civilization ' 2 Hass considered the advantages of

our bodily extensions to be five:

\&) Thev have no need of constant nourishment, thus saving energy

(b) They can be discarded or stored rather than carried (a further saving ol

energy).

(c) They are exchangeable, enabling man to specialize and to play multiple

roles: when carrying a spear, he can be a hunter, or with a paddle he

can move across the sea

Id? All of these instruments can be shared communally

(e) They can be made in the community by 'specialists' (giving nse to handi­

crafts). (The Human Animal. 103-4)

One thing Hass overlooks is the absence of biological or psychological

means of coping wi th the effects of our own technical ingenuity The

problem is clearly indicated by AT . W Simeons in Man's Presumptuous

Brain:

But when, about half a million years ago, man began very slowly to embark

upon the road to cultural advance, an entirely new situation arose The

use of implements and the control of fire introduced artifacts of which the

cortex could avail itself for purposes of living. These artifacts had no

relationship whatever to the organization of the body and could, therefore,

not be integrated into the functioning of the brain-stem.

The bram-stem's great body-regulating centre, the diencephalon, con­

tinued to function just as if the artifacts were non-existent But as the dien-

cephalon is also the organ in which instincts are generated, the earliest

humans found themselves faced with a very old problem in a new garb.

Their instinctive behaviour ceased to be appropriate in the new situations

which the cortex created by using artifacts Just as in the pre-mammalian

reptiles the new environment m the trees rendered many ancient reflexes

pointless, the new artificial environment which man began to build for him­

self at the dawn of culture made many of his animal reflexes useless,

(page 43)

To put it briefly, man cannot trust himself when using his own artefacts

For example, Konrad Lorenz argues (On Aggression) that if man had more

weaponry and armour as an organic part of himself, if he had tusks and

2 Hass, The Human Animal, 101 In the same vein, Karl Popper wrote, 'the kind of

extra-personal or exosomatrc evolution that interests me h re is This instead of growing bettei memories and brains, we grow paperr pens, typewriters, dictaphones the printing press and libraries These add to our language what may be described as new dimensions. The latest development, is the growth of computers' [Objective Knowledge,

238-9)

96 Laws of Media

horns, he would be less likely to kill his fel low men Heavily armed animals

have strong inhibitions against hurting their own species. Men, however,

have few built-in restraints against turning their artificial weapons (exten­

sions) upon one another. Firearms and bombs, which permit deadly action

at great distances, seem to relieve the user of responsibility Anthony Storr

in Human Aggression observes:

ft is obviously true that most bomber pt/ots are no betier and no worse than

other men. The majority of them, given a can of petrol and told to pour it

over a child of three and ignite it, would probably disobey the order Yet, put

a decent man in an aeroplane a few hundred feet above a village, and he

will, without compunction drop high explosives and napalm and inflict ap­

palling pain and injury on men, women and children The distance between

him and the people he is bombing makes them into an impersonal target,

no longer human beings iifce hrmsetf wrth whom he can identify (page 1 12J

Lorenz speaks in a similar fashion:

Humanity would have indeed destroyed itself by its first inventions, were n

not for the very wonderful fact that inventions and responsibility are both

the achievements of the same specifically human faculty of asking questions

The deep r emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the

fact that the crooking of trie forefinger to release a snot tears \he enxiails

of another man. No sane man would even go rabbit-hunting for pleasure if

the necessity of killing his prey with his natural weapons brought home

to him the full emotional realization of what he is actually doing.

The same principle applies to an even greater degree to the use of

modern remote-control weapons {On Aggression, page 242)

Quite apart f rom the use of weaponry at a distance, there is the effect of

the changes in man himself that result f rom using his own devices to create

environments of service. 3 Any new service environment, such as those

created by the alphabet or railways or motor cars or telegraph or radio,

deeply modif ies the very nature and image of people who use it As electric

media proliferate, whole societies at a t ime become discarnate, detached

3 Emerson put it similarly 'These tools have some questionable propeiTes They re reagents Machinery is aggressrve Ttie weaver becomes a wetr in* machinist a roddTne

All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous A man builds a tine nouse. and now he nas a master, and a task for life1 he is lc> furnishr watch, show it, and *eep i r- repa r, the rest of his davs A man has a reputation, and is no (onger free but mu$T reject ( ir A

man makfs a picture or a book, and. if it succeeds, "t is often the worse 'or h nn ', saw a brave man the oiher day hitherto as free as the hawk or the 1o> ol the wilderness, constructing his cabinet of drawers for shells, eggs, minerals, and mourned birds It was easy to see that he was amusing himself with making prerty links tor his own limbs The machine unmakes the man Nov- that the machine is so perfect, the engineer s nobodv' I'Works and Days,' 157 3)

97 Laws of Media

from mere bodily or physical 'reality' and relieved of any allegiance to or

sense of responsibility to or for it.

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly

and in very brief intervals of time, have proved

more deadly and destructive of human values

than wars fought with hardware weapons.

In the electric age, the alteration of human identity by new service

environments of information has left whole populations without personal

or community values to a degree that far exceeds the effects of food- and

fuel- and energy-shortages.

Sir Peter Medawar has wri t ten a fine essay entitled 'What's Human

about Man Is His Technology' in which he offers the straight hardware

approach to considering microscopes and radio telescopes as sensory

accessories, whereas cutlery, hammers, and automobiles 'are not sensory

but motor accessories ' All such sensory and motor organs receive their

instructions from ourselves/ Moreover, Medawar considers that although

'we are integrated psychologically w i th the instruments that serve us,'

there is no question in his mind of our serving these instruments: to him

they are neutral. He does not consider the total change of social surround

created by environments of services brought into existence by these

extensions of our bodily organs. Man and society remain essentially

unchanged by these extensions which merely serve to enhance conve­

nience or to lessen hardship. Such, at least, is Medawar's implication.

The main characteristic of man 'is not so much the devising of tools as

the communication from one human being to another of the know-how to

make them.' We cannot transmit our newly acquired 'organs' by any

process of biological heredity: 'By no manner of means can the blacksmith

transmit his brawny arms to his children, but there is nothing to stop him

from teaching his children his trade, so that they grow up lo be as strong

and skillful as himself ' That is as far as Medawar is prepared to go. T h e

evolution of this learning process ... represents a fundamentally new

biological stratagem - more important than any that preceded it - and

totally unlike any other transaction of the organism with its environment '

The transformational effects of our artificial organs - they generate totally

new conditions of environmental service and of life - these are the

concerns of Laws of Medta.

98 Laws of Media

The artist is the person who invents the means to

bridge between biological inheritance and the

environments created by technological

innovation.

Without the artist's intervention man merely adapts Xo his technologies and

become their servo-mechanism. He worships the Idols of the Tribe, of the

Cave, and of the Market. The canoeist or the motorist achieves his

equilibrium by the cultivation of reflexes, becoming an extension of these

situations, (n Men without An, Wyndham Lewis explained that the role of

art is to liberate man from the robot status imposed by 'adjusting' to

technologies. Rimbaud had put the matter simply: the job of the artist is 'le

dérèglement de tous les sens/ the upsetting of enslavements of equili­

brium and homeostasis by awakening the faculties to full awareness In

The Caliph's Design 11/ Lewrs described art as perfecting the evolutionary

process: T he creation of a work of art is an act of the same description as

the evolution of w ings on the sides of a fish, the feathering of its fins; or the

invention of a weapon within the body of a hymenopterto enable it to meet

the terrible needs of its life' ( Wyndham Lewis the Artist From 'Blast' to

Burhngton House, 257). Lew/s added. 'The art/si is older than ihe fish,

having access to primal sources of insight and design.'

Media, that is. the ground-configurations of effects, the service environ­

ments of technologies, are inaccessible to direct examination since their

effects are mainly subliminal Ferdinand de Saussure m his Course m

General Linguistics makes the same point in saying that 'the concrete

entities of language are not directly accessible/ and like media 'every­

where and always there is the same complex equilibrium of terms that

mutually condition each other' (page 110].

Our laws of media are intended to provide a ready means of identify­

ing the properties of and aciions exerted upon ourselves by our tech­

nologies and media and artefacts. They do not rest on any concept or

theory, but are empirical, and form a practical means of perceiving the

action and effects of ordinary human tools and services. They apply to all

human artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers oi

buttons, or poetic styles or philosophical systems The four laws are

framed as questions:

• What does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or

accelerate? This can be asked concerning a wastebasket, a painting, a

99 Laws of Media

steamroller, or a zipper, as well as about a proposition m Euclid or a law

of physics. It can be asked about any word or phrase in any language.

* If some aspect of a situation is enlarged or enhanced, simultaneously

the old condition or unenhanced situation is displaced thereby. What is

pushed aside crobsolesced by the new 'organ?

* What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought

into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously

obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?

* When pushed to the limits of its potential (another complementary

action), the new form wil l tend to reverse what had been its original

characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?

This tetrad of the effects of technologies and artefacts presents not a

sequential process, but rather four simultaneous ones. All four aspects are

inherent in each artefact f rom the start The four aspects are complemen­

tary, and require careful observation of the artefact in relation to its ground,

rather than consideration in the abstract. Usually, 'media study' (and

equally, promotion) covers only the first two aspects, enhancement and

obsolescence, and these lightly.

in tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not

neutral or passive, but an active logos or

utterance of the human mind or body that

transforms the user and his ground.

Enhancement and obsolescence are obviously complementary actions.

Any new technique or idea or tool, while enabling a new range of activities

by the user, pushes aside the older ways of doing things. Money speeds

transactions and gives rise to uniform pricing systems, obsoleseing haggle

and barter and much of the human relation to commodit ies The motor car

enhances private mobility, and pushes aside the old organization of the city

in favour of the suburb. 'No-fault divorce' enhances the corporate sharing

of riskand responsibility and displaces private responsibility. The pil l 'tends

To banish insecurity and uncertainty, while enhancing the 'programmable

machine' approach to the body and numbing the user to its more human

(fallible) dimensions, thus providing an amoral base for promiscuity. The

photograph enhances pictorial realism and obsolesces portrait painting

The vacuum cleaner obsolesces the broom and the beater, the dryer

100 Laws of Media

pushes aside the clothes-line, and the washer the washboard and tub; the

refrigerator replaces the icebox and the root cellar. Some forms are so

evanescent they have their own built-in obsolescence. Nothing is as stale

as yesterday's newspaper - until /t c a n be retrieved as valuable documen­

tary evidence or nostalgic treat The computer speeds calculation and

retrieval obsolescmg the 'Bob Cratchit' bookkeepers. Romanticism in

poetry gave impetus to individual hyperesthes ia and pushed aside the

eighteenth-century rationalist sensibility (left-hemisphere) 'In every fixed

definition there is obsolescence or failed insight' (George Sterner, After

Babel, 234). These are fairly easy aspects of the tetrad. The relation

between obsolescence and retrieval rs much more subtle. From Cliché to

Archetype was wr i t ten on this theme.

As outlined on the dust-jacket, the theme is 'new' archetype is 'ye olde

cliché wri t large.' Obsolescence is not the end of anything, it's the

beginning of aesthetics, the cradle of Taste, of an, of eloquence and of

slang. That is. the cultural midden-heap of cast-off clichés and obsolescent

forms is the matrix of all innovation Petrarch's Ruins of Rome was the

fount of a new humanist culture, Gutenberg technology retrieved theeniire

ancient world, whi le obsolescmg the scriptoria and scholasticism of the

Middle Ages. The needs of poet, musician, and artist for ever-new means

of probing and exploring experience send them back again and again to the

rag-and-bone shop of abandoned ci\che

The testimony of artists in this matter is impressive The stages by which

the literary archetype became substituted for the technical cliché as the

means of creation is one of the subjects of this book [From Cliché to Archetype]

As a case in point, Yeats begins 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' by

saving.

/ sought a theme ar>d sought for it in vain

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show.

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what

This poem is a ricorso or rehearsal, a retrieval of Yeats's entire career

Seeing himself as an old man, he has thrown himself on the scrap heap

He has archetypahzed himself, but first he rehearses all the cliches of his art,

all the innovations that he had introduced into the drama and poetry of his

time.

'What can I but enumerate old themes?'

Having surveyed these stages of his an, his innovations and experiments, he simpiy says.

101 Laws of Media

Those masterful images because complete.

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

His answer presents the main theme of From Cliché to Archetype tne new

poetic techniques and images are retrieved from:

A mound of refuse or the sweepmgs of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can.

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till...

Yeats brings in here the whole theme at commerce a s part of the poetic

process. His poetic exhibitionism under the big top is done The images

retrieved from 'the rag-and-bone shop' out of which he built his ladder for

the high-wire act are now complete and cast aside. H.s 'Jacob's ladder' is

gone.

'I rnust lie down where all the ladders start.' The theme in From Cliché to

Archetype is simply the scrapping of all poetic -nnovation and chohé

when it has reached a certain stage of use Masterful forms and images,

when complete, are cast aside to become 'the rag-and-bone shop of the

heart' - that is, the world of the archetype.

What about Jacob's ladder^ Jacob lay down only to climb a ladder, or to

dream, at least, of a ladder of angels ascending and descending in heavenly

hierarchy, Yeats regards the moment of poetic breakdown as a new break­

through, the beginning again of the ascent and descent of Jacob's ladder

of heavenly vision

As his poetic clichés collapse and are scrapped, he turns to the retrieval

of old forms for new clichés. It is the worn-out cliché that reveals the

creative or archetypal processes in language as in all other processes and

artifacts. {From Cliché to Archetype, 126-7)

Brunelleschi and Alberti introduced the mathematical science of per­

spective-illusion drawing to Renaissance Europe, obsolescing the medieval

symbolist style of multiple perspective, and carefully retrieving the linear

perspective of Ptolemy in the second century Samuel Edgerton Jr has

detailed this retrieval and its development as an updating of medieval and

scholastic sensibility in his The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear

Perspective. Retrieval is not simply a matter of hauling the old thing back

onto stage, holus-bolus. Some translation or metamorphosis is necessary

to place it into relation to the new ground - as anyone can testify who has

experienced 'revivals' in our culture, whether in fashion or music or any

other form. The old thing is brought up to date, as it were For archaic or

tribal man, in acoustic space, there is no past, no history - always present.

Today we experience a return to that outlook when technological break­

throughs have become so massive as to bring one environment into

collision with another, f rom telephone to radio to ^ to satellite to computer.

102 Laws of Media

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the

action is' in all structures, whether chemical,

psychic, or social, involves touch.

Touch, as the resonant interval or frontier of change and process, is

indispensable to the study of structures. It involves also the idea of 'play.'

as in the action of the interval between wheel and axle, as the basis of

human communicat ion. Since electronic man lives in a wor ld of simulta­

neous information, he frnds himself increasingly excluded from his

traditional (visual) wor ld, in which space and reason seem to be uniform,

connected and stable. Instead, Western (visual and left-hemisphere) man

now finds himself habitually relating to information structures that are

simultaneous, discontinuous, and dynamic Hearing, as such, is from all

directions at once, a 360-degree sphere. Electrically, knowing is now from

all directions at once in a 360-degree sphere, so that knowing itself has

been recast or retrieved m acoustic form, as it were

In 1917, T.S. Eliot in his 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' stressed the

view that all an from Homer to the present formed a simultaneous order

and that thus order was perpetually motivated, renewed, and retrieved by

new experience. His symbolist approach to language and art and com­

munication is wel l indicated in his celebrated definition of the auditory

imagination

What 1 call the 'auditory imagination' is the feeling for syllable and rhythm,,

penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, in­

vigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive ana1 forgotten, returning

to the origin, and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the

end. It works through meanings, cenainly, or not without meanings in tne

ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated, and the trite, the cur­

rent, and the new and the surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized

mentality. (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 118-19)

The definition points to the endless process of change and transforms/on

and retrieval implicit in this simultaneous and homeostatic structure, which

is dedicated to eternal stability. Much of the confusion of our present age

stems naturally f rom the divergent experience of Western literate man, on

the one hand, and his new surround of simultaneous or acoustic knowl

edge, on the other. Western man is torn between the claims of visual and

auditory cultures or structures.

Neo-acoustic space gives us simultaneous access to ail pasts. As for

103 Laws of Media

tribal manr for us there is no history. All is present, and the mundane

becomes mythic:

If we can consider form the reversing of archetype into cliché, as for example

the use of an archetypal Ulysses in James Joyce's novel to explore

contemporary consciousness in the city of Dublin, then we may ask what

would be the status of this pattern in primordial times, in the medieval period,

and today. The answer would seem to be that in primordial times and today

this archetype-into-cIiché process is perfectly normal and accepted but that in

the medieval period it is exceptional and unusual The Balmese say, 'We have

no art, we do everything as well as possible.' The artist in the Middle Ages,

Renaissance, or the era up to the nineteenth century was regarded as a

unique, exceptional person because he used an exceptional, unusual

process. In primordial times, as today, the artist uses a familiar, ordinary

technique and so he is looked upon as an ordinary, familiar person. Everyman

today is in this sense an artist-the administrator, the scientist, the doctor, as

well as the man who uses paint or sculpts stone. Just as the archaic man had

to follow natural processes of rhythm in order to influence and to purge,

cleanse them by ncorso, so modern electric technologies require such timing

and precision that only the following of processes in nature can be tolerated

The immediately preceding centuries of mechanization had been able to

bypass These processes by fragmentation and strip-mining kinds of proce­

dures, (from Cliché to Archetype. 118-19)

The fall or scrapping of a culture world puts

us all into the same archetypal cesspool,

engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Perhaps previous phases of culture seem more secure because tney are

fixed and processed in memory. Initially, any cliché is a breakthrough into a

new dimension of experience, Alfred North Whitehead mentions in

Science and the Modern World that the great discovery of the nineteenth

Century was that of the technique of discovery The art of discovery, the art

of acoustic, probing awareness, is now a cliché, and creativity has become

a stereotype of the twentieth century. Dis-covery, or uncovering, is a form

of retrieval.

The archetype is retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is conse­

quently a retrieved cliché - an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a

cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension,

medium, technology, or environment, an old ground seen as figure through

104 Laws of Medía

a new ground. The cliché, in other words, is incompatible with other

cliches, but the archetype is extremely cohesive, the residues of other

archetypes adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one

archetype, we unconsciously retrieve others, and this retrieval recurs r,

inUnae regress. In fact, whenevei we 'quote' one consciousness, we also

'quote' the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded

archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others 'the archetypal

unconscious' (see Fiorn Qiché to Archetype. 21-2)

Jung and his disciples have been careful to insist that the archetype is to

bo distinguished from its expression Strictly speaking, a Jungian archetype

is a power or capacity of the psyche Nevertheless, even m Jung's writ mes

the term is used wi th interchangeable senses. In Psyche and Symbol Jung

declares that 'the archetype is an element of our psychic structure and thus

a vttai and necessary component in our psychic economy \\ represents or

personifies certain instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche the real,

the invisible roots of consciousness.' Jung is careful to remind Utewy

critics to consider the archetype as a primordial symbol

Thé archetypes are by no means useless archaic survivals or relics They are

living entities, which cause the preformation of numinous ideas or dominant

representations. Insufficient understanding, however, accepts these pre­

formations in their archaic form, because they have a numinous appeal to

the underdeveloped mind Thus Communism is an archaic, primitive and

therefore highly insidious pattern which characterizes primitive social groups

it imp/res /aw/ess cbieftatnsb/p as a VJtally necessary compensation, a iact

which can only be overlooked by means of a rationalistic one-sidedness,

the prerogative of the barbarous mind.

It is important to bear m miroj that my concept of the 'archetypes' has

been frequently misunderstood as denoting inherited patterns of thought

or as a kind of philosophical speculation In reality they belong to the realm

of the activities of the tnsî/ncts and in thai sense they represent inherited

forms of psychic behaviour. As such they are invested with certain dynamic

qualities which, psychologically speaking, are designated as 'autonomy'

and 'numrnosfty ' (Psyche and Symbol. xvi)

Jung accounts for his theory of archetypes by means of the hypothesis of

a collective race memory, although he is wel l aware that there is no

scientific acceptance for such an idea. His justification, however, for using

the concept of a collective memory is based on the recurrence over a wide

area of archetypal patterns in artefacts, literatures, arts, and so on, apart

from the shaky scientific basis (see Prom Cliché to Archetype, 22-31 While

a new form or technohgy pervades the host culture as a new cliché, it

simultaneously consigns the former and now obsolete cliché or homeo­

stasis to the cultural rag-and-bone shop.

105 Laws of Media

Older clichés are retrieved both as inherent

principles that inform the new ground and new

awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures

with transformed meaning in relation to the new

ground.

The automobile ended the age of the horse and buggy, but these returned

with new significance and experience as the movie 'Western ' The tetrad -

the four laws considered simultaneously, as a cluster - is an instrument for

revealing and predicting the dynamics of situations and innovations

Nevertheless the usual 'archetypal' explanations are inadequate because

they regard the archetype as a figure minus a ground In this regard, Jean

Piaget observed:

Before we go on, we should stress the importance of this notion of

equilibration, which enables us to dispense with an archetypal explanation for

the prevalence of good forms Since equilibration laws are coercive, they

suffice to account for the generality of such processes of form selection,

heredity need not be called in at alL Moreover, it is equilibration which makes

Gestalten reenter the domain of structure .. for whether physical or

physiological, equilibration involves the idea of transformation within a

svstem and the idea of self-regulation. Gestalt psychology -s therefore a

Structuralist theory more on account of its use of equilibration principles than

because of the laws of wholeness it proposes J

Both the retrieval and reversal aspects of the tetrad involve metamor-

4 Structuralism, 57. Harold Innis, in The Bias of Communication and in Empire and

Communications, made many historical observarons on the dif'enng Gestalt patterns and structures in human orgamjation as they related to different means available for shaping situations One ol his most frequent illustrations of this principle concerned the types of bureaucracy that giewfrom the use of stone, on the one hand, and paper, on The other hand, as materials for writing When stone or brick or clay are used as writing materials, the bureaucracy or human organization of interests and energies tends to take a priestly form dedicated to stability in time When paper is available, the bureaucracy tends to become military, with a strong interest in the control of space. Innis was not only concerned with the study of changes m the o-jter patterns of human organization resulting from different means of communication m time and space, but he WW much interested m the changes that took place m the perceptual fives me people involved in these changes He played the inner and outer aspecis o< innovation and change back and fonh across each other as a figure/ground interface

106 Laws of Media

phosis. The tired cliche, movies, became available 3s an art form when r.

replaced them as the entertainment surround. Likewise the entire planer

has been letneved as a programmable resource and art form (i e , ecology\

as a side-effect of the new satellite ground. Money obsolesces barter, but

retrieves potlatch in the form of conspicuous consumption The digital

watch displaces the oid circular diaf, and retrieves the sundrai1 form, when

likewise used light itself to tell the t ime and which also had no moving parts

in the West, electronic technology displaces visual space and retrieves

acoustic space in a new form, as the ground now includes the detritus of

alphabetic civilization. However, the effect in the East is quite different, to

the degree thai /ts culture does not include a ground of phonetic literacy

and industrial hardware. Harold Innis showed [Empire and Communica­

tions) how a shift in the media of writ ing, f rom clay tablets or stone lo

papyrus, was sufficient to displace temple bureaucracies by military ones

with expansionist programs of conquest. The new speed of the lightweight

medium was enough to release left-hemisphere outward drive and

aggression. At present, Iran is enjoying the impact of electric media and

driving inward at a furious rate, having shifted from a military- to a

tempie-eonirofled government, and spearheading a revival of anciem

Islamic mores That is more than latent in many of Iran's neighbours

The principle that during the stages of their development all things

appear under forms opposite to those that they finally present is an ancient

doctrine. Interest in the power of things to reverse themselves by evolution

J S evidenced by a great diversity of observations, sage and jocular

Alexander Pope wrote, in 1 Essay on Man' (Epistle II):

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien

As to be hateO needs but to be seen;

But been too oft. familiar with us face.

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The resonant juxtapositions of Pope's epigiammahc style automatically

induce comprehensive awareness of whole situations: alert readers will

have noted that Pope has covered all four of the tetrad processes

In Take Today: The Executive as Drop-out the main themes were The

three principal reversals of Western form wrought by electric information,

from hardware to software, f rom job-structure to role-playing, and from

centralism to decentralism. In the age of electric information and pro­

grammed production, commodit ies themselves assume more and more

the character of information, although thts trend appears mainly in the

advertising budget. In his A Study of History Arnold Toynbee notes a great

many reversals of form and dynamic, as when, in the middle of the fourth

century AD, the Germans in the Roman service began abruptly to be proud

of their tribal names and to retain them.

107 Laws of Media

Such a moment marked new confidence born of saturation with Roman

values, and it was a moment marked by the complementary Roman swing

toward primitive values. (As Americans saturate with European values,

especially since TV, they begin to insist upon American coach lamps, hitching

posts, and colonial kitchenware as cultural objects.) Just as the barbarians

got to The top of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were

disposed to assume the dress and manners of tribesmen out of the

same frivolous and snobbish spirit that attached the French court of Louis

xvi to the world of shepherds and shepherdesses. It would have seemed

a natural moment for the intellectuals to have taken over while the govern­

ing dass was touring Disneyland, as it were. So it must have appeared to

Marx and his followers. But they reckoned without understanding the

dynamics of the new media of communication Marx based his analysis

most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and other implosivo

forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic.

,„ in any medium or structure there is what Kenneth Bouldmg calls a

'break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or

passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes'...

One effect of the static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous

consumption of The rich, but The effect of the speed-up of the photo had

been To provide fanTasy riches for the poor of the entire globe.

Today the road beyond its break boundary turns cities into highways, and

the highway proper fakes on a continuous urban character. Another

characteristic reversal... is that the country ceases to be the center of all

work, and the city ceases to be the center of leisure. In fact, improved

roads and transport have reversed the ancient pattern and made cities the

centers of work and the country the place of leisure and recreation

Earlier, the increase of traffic that came with money and roads had ended

the static tribal state (as Toynbee calls the nomadic food-gathering

culture). Typical of the reversing that occurs at break boundaries is the

paradox that nomadic mobile man, the hunter and food-gatherer is socially

static. On the other hand, sedentary, specialist man is dynamic, explosive,

progressive. The new magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or

inclusive, [Understanding Media, 37-81

The reversal aspect of the tetrad is succinctly exemplif ied in a maxim

from information theory; data overload equals pattern recognition. Any

word or process or form, pushed to the limits of its potential, reverses its

characteristics and becomes a complementary form, just as the airplane

reverses its controls when it passes the 'sound barrier.' Money (hardware),

pushed to its limit, reverses into the lack of money, that is, credit (software

or information!, and the credit card. At high speed or in great quantity, the

motor car reverts to nauttcal form, and traffic (or a crowd) 'f lows ' By

repetition, an archetype car become a cliché again; or an individual man a

108 Laws of Media

crowd (with no private, but rather corporate, identity). Breakdown becomes

breakthrough

In '" Labour-Saving" Means More Work,' Ruth S. Cowan points to the

reversal that every iabour-saving device is a new and larger form of W O K m

disguise. 'Homemakers/ she writes, 'log about the sanie number of hours

at their work as their grandmothers did in 1910, 1920, and 1930. The

average homemaker, now aimed w i th dozens of motors and thousanos of

electronic chips, can still spend up to 50 hours a week doing housework'

(page 17). Ail four aspects of the tetrad can be found tn herdrscussronof

vacuum cleaner, which is a grotesque extension of lungs.

For decades prior to the turn of the century, inventors had been trying to

cieate a carpet-cleaning system that would improve on the sem-annual ritual

of hauling rugs ouisióe and beavnq them

But the vacuum cleaner's introduction coincided almost precisely with ?*ie

virtual disappearance of the domestic servant. For the most economically

comfortable segment of the population, this meant one thing: The female

head of the household was doing more housework than she had over done

before Whai Magote had once done wjih a bioom. Mrs Smith was now

doing with a vacuum cleaner

... As living quarters grew, standards for their unkcep increased; rugs had

to be vacuumed daily or weekly, rather than semiannually. The net result was

That when armed with a vacuum cleaner, homemakers could keep more

space cleaner than their mothers and grandmothers would have believed

possible, (page 78)

Another reversal occurs because of the proliferation of 'household

technology'; the homemaker leaves the home.

And then there is the automobile. We do not usually thrnk of our cars AS household appliances, but that is precisely what they are, since housework

as currently understood, could not be performed without them The average

homemaker is now more likely to be found behind a steering wheel than in

front of a stove She may have to drive her children to school and after-school

activities, her husband to work or to public transport. She must shop for

groceries. Meanwhile, as more homemakers acquired cars more business¬

men discovered the profitable |oys of dispensing with delivery sen/ices

The iceman, in other words no longer cometh. Nor doth the baker, the

butcher, the grocer, the knife sharpener the seamstress, nor tbe doctor

Thus a new category has been added to the homemaker's |ob descriptor

chauffeur. ( pages 78-9)

The next stage in reversal is to the 'working homemaker' who retrieves

either the job or the home as the aesthetic base.

109 Laws of Media

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the

limits of their potential.

On the telephone or on the air, it isn't messages that travel at electric

speed: the sender is sent, minus a bodyH as information and image, and all

the old relationships of speaker and audience tend to be reversed

The laws of the media in tetrad form reveal some of the subliminal and

previously inaccessible aspects of technology To the extent that these

observations reveal the hidden effects of artefacts on our lives, they are

endeavours of art, bridging the worlds of biology and technology

HJ. Eysenck, the British psychologist, observes.

In some form or other. The law of effect has been one of the most w ;dely

recognized generalizations in the whole of psychology The belief that

rewards and punishments are powerful tools for the selection and fixation of

desirable acts and the elimination of undesirable ones' (Postman. 1947) is

almost universal, and although the law itself is usually associated with the

name of Thorndike (1911) who first used this phrase, he had precursors, e.g.

Bain (18681 and Spencer (1870), who brought together the contributions of

Associationism, Hedonism, and the Evolutionary Doctrine in a coherent form

closely resembling Thorndike's own formulation. This formulation w a s as follows:

Of several responses made to the same situation, those which were

accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other

Things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that

when it returns, they will be more likely to recur; those which arc

accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other

things being equal, have their connection with the situation weakened

so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the

satisfaction or discomfort the greater the strengthening or weakening of

the bond.

('Personality and the Law of Effect.' 133)

The law of effect is strangely concentrated on the figure and its

encounter with other figures, rather than on the figure in relation to the

ground, or the total situation. 'Connections' are visual: there is no

connection between figure and ground, but only interface. The left-

hemisphere bias in Western thought, which directs attention to the figure

or the idea or the concept, is typical not only of psychology but of

philosophy and of science. Anthropology, in contrast, began by using the

ground or the total culture itself as a figure for attention, thus seeming to

110 Laws of Media

break with the two-thousand-year tradition of considering figure-minus-

ground. In Thomas Kuhn's study. The Structure of Scientific Révolutions,

the paradigms or extended metaphors which he sees as channelling

scientific endeavours in various fields and times are considered as tsolaiea

figures without any social or cultural ground whatever. The only interplay

that he allows them is wi th other paradigms, past or present (In the

Kuhn-Popper debate about legal innovation in science. Popper as it were

embodies the obsolescence phase - 'falsification' - and Kuhn the reversal

phase: who. one might ask. speaks for the rest of the 1etrad ?) Moreover,

T S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' was revolutionary precisely

because he considered the totality of language and culture as a unified

ground to which the individual talent had to be related Indeed, a basic

assumption of Old Science is the left-hemisphere need for abstract

measurement and quantification of effects.

The left-hemisphere paradigm of quantitative measurement and of

precision depends on a hidden ground, which has never been discussed by

scientists in any field. That hidden ground is the acceptance of visual space

as the norm of science and of rational endeavour The implementors and

users of visual space had, and have, the hidden phonemic ground of their

discoveries or of their left-hemisphere preferences in the organization of

thought and explorât/on Today it is easy for us to perceive what

programmed them as a hidden ground, because that ground has itself

become a figure starkly portrayed against the new ground of the electnc

information environment Instant information, as an environment, has the

effect of pushing all other subliminal effects up into consciousness. That is,

it has this effect wi th regard to all forms except itself, since the effect of an

electric environment is to turn peopie inward and to substitute the inner tnp

for outer exploration, being for becoming.

That the hidden grounds of other cultures should now be available for

inspection creates the worlds of structural linguistics and of anthropologi­

cal and ecological studies on a wor ld scale. For the structural1 is

constituted by the simultaneous and is antithetic to the visual, which it now

makes perceptible as an exotic figure. When the environment of instant

information becomes the hidden ground of all perception, choice, and

preference, the ground that underlays the wor ld of precise and quantifiable

scientific study is pushed aside or dissolved. All of our other senses create

spaces peculiar to themselves, and all of these spaces are indivisible and

immeasurable Tactile space is the space of the resonant interval, as

acoustic space is the sphere of simultaneous relations They are as

indivisible as osmic or kinetic space <smell or stress) The study of the law

of effect 1 has been the area of scientific study since Galileo, but when data

became available at electric speeds of retrieval, pattern recognition and

I l l Laws of Media

transformation tended to supplant the exclusive concern wi th quantifiable

results.

The field of 'information theory' began by

using the old hardware paradigm of

transportation of data from point to point

Since electric information is simultaneously everywhere, the transporta­

tion theory yields its relevance to the awareness of transformation of

'software.1

The Western world is hung-up on the problem of visual versus acoustic

spaceP seeming unable to let go of the 'common-sense' visual, even as it

flounders in the acoustic ground Gestalt psychology took a step away from

visual space with its figure/ground paradigm. However, most psychologists

still assume that both figure and ground are visual components in visual

situations. In fact, they form an iconic or tactile relationship, defined by the

resonant interval between them

The degree of confusion that exists in many fie Ids of study wi th regard to

the visual and the acoustic is apparent in Ferdinand de Saussure's Course

in General Linguistics, with his division of language and speech. For

Saussure. language is a total and inclusive wor ld of simultaneous struc­

tures (that is, right-hemisphere and acoustic), whereas speech, which is

sequential, is a relatively superficial and visual form. Wi th these divisions of

language and speech, Saussure associated the diachronicand synchronic:

But to indicate more clearly the opposition and crossing of two orders of

phenomena that relate To the same object, I prefer to speak of synchronic and

dtachronic linguistics Everything that relates to the static side of our science

is synchronic, everything that has to do with evolution is dtachronic Similarly.

synchrony and d'dchrony designate respectively as language-state and an

evolutionary phase...

The first thing that strikes us when we study the facts of languages is that

their succession in time does not exist insofar as the speaker is concerned

He is confronted with a state That is why the linguist who wishes to

understands state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it

and ignore diachrony He can enter the mind of speakers only by completely

Suppressing the past. The intervention of history can only falsify his

judgment. (Course in General Linguistics, 8}

112 Laws of Media

It probably would have done nothing to clarify these divisions if Saussure

had said that the synchronic concerns the acoustic world of the inclusive,

the simultaneous, and the unchanging. Even now, the futility of referring to

visual as opposed to acoustic space resides in the fact that Western man

still equates all space wi th the visual, just as in the eighteenth century all

gases were considered variants or pollutions of ait When anthropologist

E.R Leach turns to the thought of Lévi-Strauss, he says. Lévi-Strauss is

distinguished among the intellectuals of his own country as the leading

exponent of "Structural ism/' a word which has come to be used as if it

denoted a whole new philosophy of life on the analogy of "Marx ism" or

"Existential ism." What is this "Structural ism" all about?' [Claude Lévi-

Strauss, 15), When Leach comes to examine the matter, he remarks 'Two

features in Lévi-Strauss' position seem crucial. First, he holds that the

study of history diachronically and the study of anthropology cross-

culturally but synchronicaJly. are two alternative ways of doing the same

kind of things' (pages 7-8) What emerges at once from Leach's approach

to Lévi-Strauss is the fact that Leach does not know that the dsachronic is

visual (or left-hemisphere) m structure, and the synchronic is acoustic [or

right-hemisphere! m structure. Having fallen off the rails completely at that

early point in his tour of Lévi-Strauss, he not surprisingly fails to relate to

Lévi-Strauss in any way whatever A great deal of what emerges is

ignorance of the character of the diachromc and the synchronic, including

the fact that these categories, used in linguistics and anthropology alike,

are not understood as presenting Che structural clash between the visual

and the acoustic. Elsewhere Leach takes a look behind the work of Lévi-

Strauss and discovers;

This, in itself, is no new idea. A much older generation of anthropologists,

notably Adolf Bastjan M826-1905) m Germany and Frazer in England

held that because all men belong to one species there must be psychologi­

cal universal (Elementargedanken} which should manifest themselves

m the occurrence of similar customs among peoples 'who had reached the

same stages of evolutionary development' all over the world. Frazer and

his contemporaries assiduously compiled immense catalogues of 'similar'

customs whrch were designed to exh/Ut this evolutionary peop l e Th s

is not what the structuralists are up to. (page 22)

The advantage of this passage is that it reveals another set of hang ups:

namely, that the archetypal and transcendental position, where it concerns

'psychological universals,' is itself based on the use of the paradigm of

visual structure to the detr iment of acoustic structure.

113 Laws of Media

When Coleridge said that ail men are born

either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying

that ail men tend to be either acoustic or

visual in their sensory bias.

But now that this bias has divided the culture of the entire Western World in

the electric age, it is no ionger a matter of personal temperament or

preference, but concerns the very fate of the intelligible, as such. When

Leach says 'this is not what the structuralists are up to,' he is also declaring

his own unawareness of the difference between visual and acoustic

structures. He proceeds to relate the work of Roman Jakobson to that of

Lévi-Strauss and of Noam Chomsky: 'The influence of Jakobson 's style of

phonemic analysis on the work of Lévi-Strauss has been very marked, it is

therefore relevant that although certain aspects of Jackobson's work have

lately been subjected to criticism, Noam Chomsky specifically recognizes

the fundamental importance of Jakobson's mam theory of distinctive-

feature analysis (which reappears in Lévi-Strauss1

Structuralism) is now

rejected by many leading linguists' (page 23).

The inability of Leach to grasp the different structures of the visual and

the acoustic is matched by the similar inability of Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss,

and Chomsky, all of w h o m are unwittingly commit ted to the structures of

visual space wi th its continuities and homogeneities, rather than to the

resonant intervals of acoustic space. In spite of the failure to recognize the

antithetic nature of the visual and the acoustic, those who feel attracted to

structuralism tend to strive to discover inclusive interrelationships in the

situations they study.

Visually biased, or left-hemisphere people, accustomed to the abstract

study of figures minus their ground, are commonly upset by any sudden

intrusion of the forgotten or hidden or subliminal ground:

The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed, continually,

simply and naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding

environment.

We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects,

which were beyond their immediate control. They would not accept the

fact that their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that

word below their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried

they could not read the word unless they put their visual axis directly on the

114 Laws of Media

word, thus spoiling the experiment. To avoid such effects, of course, we

had an observer looking at their eyes and any cases in which they let their

eyes move were discounted This kind of upset was easily corrected by

continuing the demonstrations. As the person got used to such results and

accepted them, he DO longer became upset by the unconscious opera­

tions of his biocomputer. (John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone, 67)

It is the role of the artist to keep the communi ty in conscious relation to

the changing and hidden ground of its preferred objectives. Anais Nin

writes of D H r Lawrence:

Lawrence's characters, whether in poetry, allegory or prophecy, are actors

who speak with the very accents of our emotions, and. before we are

aware, our feelings become identified and involved with theirs Some have

reco/ied from such an awakening, often unpleasant; many have dreaded

having to acknowledge this power of their physical sensations, as well as to

face in plain words, the real meaning of Their fantasies.

Lawrence was reviled for going so far. There are always those who fear

for that integral kernel in themselves, for that divine integrity which can

be preserved by ignorance (before psychology) or by rehgton (before and

after psychology) or by the cessation of thought (by the modern parox­

ysm of activity) [D H Lawrence, 33)

The task confronting contemporary man is to

five with the hidden ground of his activities as

famifiar/y as our /iterate predecessors iived

with the figure minus ground.

in his Propaganda. Jacques Ellul explains that the basic conditioning or

shaping of populations is done, not by programs for various media, but by

the media themselves, and by the very language that we take for granted:

'Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be

preceded by propaganda that is sociological in character, slow, general,

seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary

attitudes' (page 15). After this preparation of the ground, the whole cultural

ground Itself must be mobilized, not messages but the new configuration

of the whole ground constitutes propaganda: 'Propaganda must be total.

11 5 Laws of Media

The propagandist must utilize allot the technical means at his disposal - the

press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing' (page

9). That is, the media themselves, and the whole cultural ground are forms

of language and of what Bacon termed Idols of the Marketplace, The

transforming power of language is recognized by contemporary phenome­

nology and linguistics as wel l :

Further, the usurpation of language does not merely involve the social de­

gradation of words, nor the abuse of our listener's confidence More pro­

foundly, language inserts itself into the self-consciousness of each man as a

screen that distorts him in his own eyes. The intimate being of man is in

fact confused, indistinct, and muluple. Language intervenes as a power

destined to expropriate us from ourselves in order to bnng us into line

with those around, in order to model us to the common measure of all. It

defines and perfects us, it terminates and determines us. The control of

consciousness it exercises makes it the accomplice of having, in its mono­

lithic poverty, as opposed to the plurality of being. To the degree that we

are forced to resort to language we renounce our interior life because lan­

guage imposes the discipline of exteriority. The use of speech is thus

one of the essential causes of the unhappy conscience, all the more essen­

tial because we cannot be without it. It is this which Bruce Param has

strongly emphasized:

At every moment, each consciousness destroys a little bit of the vocabu­

lary it has received and against which it cannot fail to revolt, because it

is not its; but immediately it recreates another vocabulary in which it

once again disappears.

(Georges Gusdorf, Speaking. 42-3)

The degree to which language as ground biases awareness was very

vidid in the experience of Jacques Lusseyran. In his autobiography. A n d

There Was Light, he provides an excellent structural or equilibrium approach

of his own. The book is an account of the reordering of all of his sensory life

as the result of a violent childhood accident in which he lost his sight. Loss

of sight greatly enhanced the activity of his other senses and led to the

development (or retrieval] of an inner sight as wel l Altogether, he became

aware that, in the sighted world in which he lived, there were a great many

assumptions about perception that needed questioning

How should I explain the way objects approached me when I was the one

walking in their direction? Was I breathing them in or hearing them? . as

I came closer, their mass was modified, often to the point of defining real

contours...

116 Laws of Media

As with The sense of louch r what came to me from objects was pres­

sure .. When \ became really attentive and did not oppose my own pres­

sure to my surroundings, then trees and rocks came to me and panted their

shape upon me like lingers leaving their impression m wax.

This tendency of ob|ects to project themselves beyond their physical

limits produced sensations as definite as sight or hearing Ipages 31 -3)

In presenting the laws of media in tetrad form, our object is To draw

attention to situations that are still in process, situations that are structuring

new perception and shaping new environments, even white they are

restructuring old ones, the structures of media dynamics are inseparable

f rom performance Our effort has been to draw attention to the laws o(

composition as wel l as to the factors of regulation and interplay.

In The Study of Human Communication, Nan Lin stated, 'The ultimate

goal of science is to explain by means of a set of theories, events that are

observed' (page 192) The tetrads of our science are not based on a theory

or set of concepts, but rather rely on observation, and on experience, ana

on percepts. While empirical, they provide a basis for prediction, for

example, that retrievals or reversals of a certain form will occur.

As indicated earlier, all human artefacts are extensions of man,

outermgs or uttenngs of the human body or psyche, private or corporate

That is to say. they are speech, and they are translations of us. the users,

f rom one form into another form metaphors.

Etymology is so crucial that it deserves a host of separate studies.

Etymology reveals a process of transformation of culture and sensipiicy

and is also a matter of retrieval and of structure the ground pattern o :

forces at the levels of molecular and atomic structure At and beyond this

level lies the structure of experience of the utterer; so grammatical flips

into rhetorical investigation

Aristotle first noted that the Greek invention of Nature was made

possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature/

by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature}. And

A.T.W. Simeons has discussed at length how disruptive the second nature

has been to the first Made discarnate by our electric information media,

the West is furiously at work retrieving its obsolesced organic first nature in

a spectrum of new aesthetic modes, f rom feminism to phenomenology. As

our second nature consists entirely rn our artefacts and extensions and the

grounds and narcoses they impose, their etymologies are all to be found

in first nature, the wild body. They have no hierarchy or orderly sequence,

they subsume, obsolesce, retrieve, extend each other, burrow on each

other, hybridize, and mtscegenate endlessly The folowing list is repre

sentative;

\ \1 Laws oi Media

club hammer

clothing

house

saw. knife, bullet

wrrtmg

mirror, telescope,

microscope camera.

spectacles

cup, bowl

refrigerator

weapons

rope

wheel

c rowd

tribe

automobile

chair

bed

satellite

spacecraft

stairs

number

extends forearm, fist

skin

skeleton (as carapace)

teeth

eye

eye

hands (cupped)

stomach

arms, legs, teeth, nails

sinew

feet tm motion)

group, individual

family

whole body

head, eyes (numbs rest)

flesh

whole culture

planet

legs

hand, fingers

Whereas mechanical forms extend the limbs and organs, electric technolo­

gies beginning wi th the telegraph extend the nervous system and the

conscious and unconscious in one or another manner and degree. (From

the etymology of 'technology' it appears that the family extends the

individual as the Greek for art, techne, and for child, technon, have

common ancestry.) Technologies are the brain-children of the uttering left

hemisphere, so the problem of what any one or group means has 1 0 be

studied also in the way each adjusts the relation between left and right

hemispheres and the diencephalom

In other words, the crucial study that remains is that of working out in

precise detail the relations between second and first natures: which organs

or faculties are extended or stressed or numbed and in which pattern or

degree by each one of our artefacts. This is to make explicit, via etymology,

the analogical ratios that constitute our being and our cultures. Language is

one resource and, as Joyce found, infallible when handled properly, fn the

case of the chair, for example, each part is named for the part of the body

that it extends and replaces (first nature); feet, legs, seat, back, arms, and

so on. Each of these is systemically numbed m the user as the chair diverts

energy from it in the direction of the head and eyes. Are nails an extension

118 Laws of Media

of fingernails? of teeth? Our artists have spent endless hours exploring

these same matters as they relate to changes in sensibility, so their work

may be mined for further clues. Shakespeare saw the Court as the heart of

the state, the body politic. The belly addresses the members'

True is it my Incorporate Friends (quoth he)

That I receiue the generall Food at first.

Which you do hue vpon; and fit it is,

Because I am the Store-house, and the Shop

Of the whole Body But, if you do remember,

I send it through the Riuers of your blood.

Even to the Court, the Heart, to th'seat o' th'Bram .

[Conolanus, I, i, 137-43)

Perhaps now, in a democracy the pollster is the pacemaker? When James

Joyce wrote Ufysses. he pfayed on the analogical ratios between texts (his

and Homer's) and also between situations, arts, symbols, and organs of the

body in organizing his own text. s So he saw, for example, the house as

extended skeleton, the bed as deriving from the principle of flesh (padding)

the streets as circulation (of blood), and the newspaper as lungs (obsolesc-

ing the town crier and retrieving the figures of eloquence). In Finnegdns

Wake he saw the internal-combustion engine as a metaphor for the

stomach, which likewise converts fuel into energy.

To dale, linguistics, philosophy, and semiotics have all stopped short of

etymology (relation between figure and ground), at the limits of denotation

or connotation - content and concept. Without ground or the aid of rhetoric

or grammar or both they are prevented from making the leap into percepts

and true science: media study remains restricted to content and morahsm.

Similarly wi th exegesis of words or things dialectic is stopped at the level of

description or of matching signifier and signified, only the technique of

resonant mterpiay of figures and grounds will make sense of metaphor, the

basis of all words and all speech. Technology - second nature -

recapitulates first nature in new forms; that is, it translates f rom one nature

to another; the user is the content and the utterer; technology, as

extension/outenng, is speech. George Steiner sums up some of the

foregoing themes in the light of hemispheric asymmetry;

Some anthropologists argue that the emergence of 'true language' was

more sudden, thai n coincided w/th the abrupt forward Jeap in the elabo­

ration and diversity of tool-making towards the end of the last Ice Age.

Neither hypothesis can be verified. But it might be that neither sees the

5 Vtde his chart of 'Conespondences' repfOcJuced enlnt- jr> James Joyce. The Poeir/ o'

Conscience by Mary Parr.

119 Laws of Media

full import of as ymmet r y Pav lov 's often-reiterated belief is worth recalling

the p r o c e s s e s of learning and of language m m e n are different from

those m an imals The s o u r c e s of superfluity, with their anatomical ana­

logue m the a s ymme t r i e s of the cortex, generate n e w su rp luses. A s ym­

metry, in the central s e n s e of wh ich the conf igurat ions of the brain are the

enacting form, w a s the trigger. It se t in motion the d i s sonance , the dia­

lectic of human c o n s c i o u s n e s s . Unl ike animal spec i e s w e are out of balance

with and in the wor ld. S p e e c h is the c o n s e q u e n c e and the maintainer of

this disequi l ibr ium. {After Babel, 281}

S te i ne r h o l d s that it is s p e e c h tha t k e e p s u s h u m a n a n d s a v e s u s f r om, a s

L e w i s h a s it, b e c o m i n g r obo t s (Ce r ta i n l y it a n d o u r t e c h n o l o g i e s a s o t h e r

s p e e c h - w e s p e a k o u r s e l v e s - h a v e e n a c t e d ou r t w o n a t u r e s , e f f e c t i v e l y

ho ick ing u s out of s e r v i t u d e to Na tu re , but l e a v i ng u s s l a v e s to i h e v a g a r i e s

of s e c o n d na t u r e ) T h e a s y m m e t r y he r e f e r s to is p h y s i c a l : in 6 5 per c e n t of

c a s e s s t u d i e d , t h e planum temporale o n t h e left s i d e of t h e bra in w a s

one-third l onge r t h a n tha t o n t h e r ight . 6 ' T h i s a s y m m e t r y , w h i c h s e e m s to

be gene t i ca l l y d e t e r m i n e d , is d r a m a t i z e d by t he f a c t that t h e g r ea t ma jo r i t y

of h u m a n b e i n g s a r e r i gh t-handed. E v i d e n c e for t h i s g o e s b a c k to t h e

ear l ies t k n o w n s t o n e t o o l s . No s u c h c e r e b r a l u n b a l a n c e h a s b e e n f o u n d in

p r ima t es o r a n y o t h e r a n i m a l s p e c i e s ' {After Babel, 2 8 0 - 1 ) . T h i s f i nd ing

s t rong ly s u g g e s t s a d i r ec t re la t ion b e t w e e n an i m b a l a n c e in f i rs t na t u r e a n d

the origin of s p e e c h a n d a r t e f a c t s - s e c o n d na t u r e S t e i n e r is a l s o a c u t e l y

a w a r e of t h e e n h a n c e m e n t (cogn i t i on ) a n d re t r i eva l ( re-cogni t ion, re­

mak ing) a s p e c t s of l a n g u a g e a n d s u g g e s t s that it w a s t he d i s c o v e r y of t h e

retr ieval f unc t i on t ha t e n a b l e d s p e a k e r s to flip l a n g u a g e out of c o n t e n t a n d

into t e c h no l o g y :

Then, it may be towa rds the end of the last Ice Age, occur red the explos ive

discovery that language is mak ing and re-making, that s ta temen ts can be

free of fact and utility .. The re is, to be sure, no ev idence that this discovery,

with which language as w e know it truly begins, w a s explos ive. But

interrelated advances in cranial capaci ty, in the making of tools, and, so far

as w e can |udge, in the l i neaments of socia l organization do sugges t a

quantum lump. The symbo l i c affinities b e tween wo rds and fire, be tween

the live twist of f lame and the darl ing tongue, are immemor ia l ly archaic

and firmly en t renched in the s ubconsc i o u s (page 230)

6 Steiner, Afrer Babel. 280. gives these references cf Norman Geschwmd and Waller

Levitsky, 'Human Brain: Left-Right Asymmetries in Temporal Speech Regions.' Science,

CLXI, 1968, and Norman Geschwmd, 'Language and the Brain,' Scientific American,

CCXXVI, 1972

120 Laws of Media

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Structurally speaking, a metaphor is a technique of presenting or or

observing one situation m terms of another situation. It Is a technique ot

awareness, of perception (right hemisphere) not of concepts (left hemis­

phere). As t wo situations are involved, there are two figure/ground

relations in apposition. Normally, only two of the four elements are made

explicit; the others remain implicit.

All metaphors have four components in analogical otto 'Cats are the

crabgrass of l ife' presents 'cats are to (my) life as crabgrass is to an

otherwise beautiful lawn ' Or, 'she sailed into the room' presents 'her

motion entering the room 1 in terms of a ship's swift (perhaps forceful or

graceful) mot ion under sail. To say that metaphor has four terms that are

discontinuous, yet in ratio to one another, is to say that the baste mode ot

metaphor is resonance and interval - the audile-tactile.

Apropos the four-part structure that relates to all human artefacts (verbal

and non-verbal), its existence is canary not deliberate or intentional

Rather, it is a test imony to the fact that the mind of man is structurally active

in all human artefacts and hypotheses. That these appositionat ratios are

not also present in the structure of the natural' world raises an entirely

separate question. It is perhaps relevant to point out that the Greeks made

no entelechies or observations of the effects of man-made technology, bui

only of what they considered the objects of the natural wor ld.

The usual approach to metaphor is purely verbal rather than operational

or structural that is, in left-hemisphere terms of the figures only, minus

their grounds. Thus, metaphor is discussed as a form of sort-crossing'or of

'category mistake' or of 'm(s-nam/ng. r For example, as C M. Turbayne

points out ; 7

However appropriate in one sense a good metaphor may be. rn anotner

sense there is something inappropriate about it. This inapprupriateness

results from the use of a sign in a sense different from the usual, which use

I shall call 'sort-cross'ing' Such son-crossing is the first definite leature of

metaphor and, according to Aristotle, its genus

Metaphor (meta-phora) consists in giving the thing a name that belongs

to something else; the transference (epi-phoral being either from iienus

to species, or on the grounds of analogy. {Poetics 1457b)

7 C M Turbayne. The Myth of Metaphor. 1 1 A complete bibliography uf the I t enu re on

metaphor is presented tn MeUtphof An Annotated BMvgr&pby &~>a H<storv by WrirrenA

Sh-bles

121 L aws of Media

Elsewhere in the Rhetoric, Aristotle betrays his left-hemisphere visual bias

in his confusion of metaphor and simile. He regards both of these rhetorical

figures as concepts and as prepositional, whereas metaphor is discon­

tinuous, abrupt and appositional. His approach is descriptive rather than

structural or perceptual.

Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor is devoted to an examination and

discussion of recent approaches to metaphor f rom various disciplines,

including linguistics, semantics, the philosophy of language, literary

criticism, and aesthetics. In discovering the Aristotelian notion of metaphor

as 'alien usage' - the 'substitution theory' - he makes a revealing slip

regarding his own assumptions about words:

Now the fact that the metaphorical term is borrowed from an alien domain

does not imply that it substitutes for an ordinary word which one could

have found in the same place. Mevertheless, it seems that Aristotle himself

was confused on this point and thus provided grounds for the modern

critiques of the rhetorical theory of metaphor The metaphorical word takes

the place of a non-metaphorical word that one could have used (on condi­

tion that it exists), so it is doubly alien, as a present but borrowed word and

as substitute for an absent word (page 19)

However, all words are metaphor (except, in a special sense, the word

'word' itself |: the non-metaphorical word is a feature only of primitive tribal

thought and experience about words. The native hunter or Inuit says, 'Of

course "s tone" is stone, else how could I known s tone ? l

Language a/ways preserves a play or

figure/ground relation between experience, and

perception and its rep/ay in expression.

Poets regard language as the storehouse of experience. It is this same

left-hemisphere approach to the right-hemisphere (appositional) properties

of language that prompts Ricoeur to relegate all technology to the domain

of logos rather than to that of mythos.

At the heart of Ricoeur's approach to metaphor is the 'transportation

theory' of communicat ion. It is, he remarks, 'the relationship between

Aristotle's embryonic classification and the concept of transportation,

which constitutes the unity of meaning of the genus " metaphor"' (page

21). Ricoeur continues:

122 Laws of Media

Two facts should be noted First, transposition operates between logical

poles. Metaphor occurs in an order already constituted in terms of genus

and species, and in a game whose relation-rules - subordination, co-ordinatior,

proportionality or equality of relationships - are already given. Second, meta­

phor consists in a violation of this order and this game In giving to a

genus the name of a species, to the fourth term of the proportional relation­

ship the name of the second term, and vice versa, one simultaneously

recognizes and transgresses the logical structure of language (1457b 12-20],

The anu, discussed earlier, applies not just to the substitution of one word

for another, but also to the jumbling of classification m cases that do not

have to do only w i th making up for lexical poverty. Aristotle himself did not

exploit this idea of a categorical transgression which some modern authors

compare to Gilbert Ryle's concept of 'category mistake'. Doubtless thus was

because he was more interested, within the perspective of his Poetics,

m the semantic gain attached to the transference of names tnan m the

logical cost of the operation. The reverse side of the process, however, is

at least as interesting to describe as the obverse (page 21 )

Ricoeur is t ry ing to hold the discussion of metaphor m terms of the

match ing rather than the making process, m te rms of logic and dialectic

instead of poesis, in t e rms of (descript ive! concepts instead of percepts. To

do so, it is necessary to ignore ground and to create a dialectic of polar

figures, t o reduce propor t ion to me re equalit ies (which robs them of

resonance), and to interpolate a 'logical st ructure' of language. In conse­

quence, he speaks of (Aristotelian) analogy, 'wh ich, as w e have seen, is

analysed as an ident i ty or similarity of two relations' (page 21} and c i îhe

logical m o m e n t of proport ional i ty' (page 34).

A con t empo ra r y Jacques Derrida, sees metaphor as a connected triad

of signs progress ing f rom savage to civilized, f rom first nature to second

nature Wo rk i ng f rom Rousseau's Essay, he proposes t h a t ' i t is not fear

itseJf that the wo rd giant expresses literally,' but rather ' the idea that the

passion presents to us' :

The idea giant' rs at once the literal sign of the représenter of the passion,

the metaphoric sign of the object [the terrifying man that one calls a

giant] and the metaphoric sign of the affect (fear). That sign is metaphoric

because it is false with regard to the obfect; it is metaphoric because it is

indirect with regard to the affect: it is the sign of a sign, it expresses emo­

tion only Through another sign, through the représenter of fear, namely

through the false sign It represents the affect literally only through repre­

senting a false représenter. {Of Gramrnstology, 277)

Derrida insists on visual match ing and connect ion of f igures that contains

point to or represent each other in t he triadic chain A : B : C . In this variety of

the t ransportat ion theory, meaning is carried via matching and connection

123 Laws of Media

George Steiner conf i rms that present-day dialecticians are still mired m

the transportation approach;

It is worth noting that the development of modern phenomenology has

accentuated the areas of overlap between translation theory and ihe

general investigation of sense and meaning. The conceptual claims, the

idiom of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas force on anyone

concerned with the nature of translation a fuller awareness of, a more re­

sponsible discomfort at, notions of identity and otherness, of mteniionahty

and signification. When Levinas writes that 'le langage est le dépasse­

ment incessant de la Sinngebung par la signification' (significance constantly

transcends designation), he comes near to equating all speech-acts with

translation m the way indicated at the outset of this study | Totalité et

infime, 273.\ Phenomenological ontologies look very much like medita­

tions on the 'transportability' of meanings. {After Babel, 278)

Steiner's own approach, and his entire study. After Babe/, \$ based on the

grammatical awareness both of metaphor as translation and of translation

as transformation of sensibility.

Ricoeur's main problem, and that of most contemporary 'rhetorical'

criticism, is related to the confusion that arises from not dealing w i th

something on its own terms. Throughout his discussion, Ricoeur leans on

Aristotle's distinction of metaphor as part of rhetoric on the one hand, and

as part of dramatic mimesis on the other. His essential point is contained rn

Aristotle's statement, 'to metaphonze wel l implies an intuitive perception

of the similarity m disslmilars.' Full explication of the unresolved and

unquestioned assumptions in Ricoeur's, and for that matter, all modern

examination of metaphor would require an extensive history of the trivium

-grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. As yet, no such history exists, though

portions of it are available; for example, in the work of Werner Jaeger, W S

Howell, Walter Ong, Henri de Lubac, and H.I. Marrou, to mention a few.

However, these suffer f rom not accounting for the interdependence and

interaction of the 'three roads' (the trivium)

Intense rivalry characterized the trivium from

the outset Plato's and Aristotle's dialectical

accounts of rhetoric are severely biased.

The trivium, the arts or sciences of the logos, was born of the phonetic

alphabet. As shown in chapter one, the effect of phonetic literacy on the

Greek psyche and culture was catastrophic. Mimesis gave way to

124 Laws of Media

individualized detachment, and the integral resonating oral logos was

broken into multiple fragments, each bearing some one or another of its

original properties. For more than a century a great number of these

systems were invented by poets, exegetes, philosophers, rhetors, and so

on, but it was the fifth-century Stoics who formulated the essential

tripartite relationship The Stoics developed a 'threefold logos' that served

as the pattern for the trivium, although the trivium itself was not formally

recognized as the basis of education and science for some time. The

pre-alphabetic logos was retrieved in two ways; it informed the Patristic

'doctrine of the logos,' and it was recapitulated in the overlapping

structures of the threefold Stoic logos.

Briefly, the relation between the Stoic system and the trivium is as

follows, the Stoic iogos hendtathetos fS the inner, abstract word in the

mind prior to (or minus) speech. Its pattern appears in dialectic (logic and

philosophy) via emphasis on abstraction (figure minus ground! and

absolutes, and on correct thought form (sequence), irrespective of

audience. The Stoic iogos prophonkos is the 'uttered word' and corre­

sponds to rhetoric as the science of transforming audiences with speech

Their iogos sperrnatikos is the (uttered) logos as 'seeds' embedded m

things animate or inanimate that structure and inform them and provide the

formal principles of their being and growth (becoming). This third logos is

the root of grammar (which meant 'literature') with its twin concerns of

etymology and multiple-level exegesis, the ground-search for structure and

roots. All of the sciences of the later quadnvium [of music, arithmetic,

geometry, and astronomy) were subdivisions of grammar, as forms of

exegesis of the Book of Nature Ancient rhetoric and grammar, then are

principally right-hemisphere activities, a dialectical rendering of either one

(such as Plato's or Aristotle's), quite aside from partisanship, woufd be at

best a metaphor for, or a biased translation of, the original.

The wars of the Ancients and the Moderns were

grounded in a rivalry between the hemispheres.

Throughout its history, the trivium was beset by rivalries, later known as the

'wars of the Ancients and the Moderns.' Grammar (the encyclopedic

tradition of learned exegesis and commentary) and rhetoric together

usually held control of the trivium against the conflicting claims of the

dialecticians.

Following the Greek rhetorician Isocrates, Cicero, and after him Quin-

125 L a w s of Media

tilian. established the basic pattern for Western civilized education,

reaffirmed by St Augustine four ceniunes later as The alignment of

encfopedic wisdom and eloquence. That is, w i th the trivium as a retrieval of

the oral logos on the new ground of writ ing, the conjunction of giammar

and rhetoric on the one hand, and dialectic on the other, provided a balance

of the hemispheres. For these men, 'tradition' had the same right-

hemisphere figure-ground resonance and simultaneity that was proposed

by T.S Eliot (a modern grammarian of ancient ilk). For more than f ifteen

centuries, most of our Western history, the Ciceronian program, itself a

retrieval of the old Greek liberal educational system, the 'egkukhos paideia'

{vide Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity) was the basis of liberal

education and Christian humanism. With print, via Gutenberg, the visual

stress of the alphabet gained new ascendancy H Spearheaded by the

French dialectician Peter Ramus, a new battle of the Ancients (rhetoricians

and grammarians) and Moderns (dialecticians) was waged, and dialectic

'Method' obsolesced tradition. Since that t ime grammar and rhetoric have

been cast in a dialectic or left-hemisphere mould, along with ail of our arts

and sciences. It is only w i th the return to acoustic space m this century, to

right-hemisphere multisensory forms of awareness, that the tables begin

to turn once more.

Laws of Media offers a bridge between the hemispheres, a dialogue-

structure in accordance wi th the role of the corpus cailosurn, which

neurosurgeons identify as the organ that facilitates interplay between the

two types of cognition Until now, the conventional form in analysis or

exposition has been triadic and logical, as in the syllogism It is ultimately a

pro posit ion a i left-hemisphere form, rigid and connected, in the pattern of

efficient cause.

The logical syllogism has the connected triadic or triangular form

All As are Bs.

C is an A.

Therefore C is a B.

as in

3 C1 The Gutenberg Galaxy tora del ailed d iscus ión, also cf The Coming of ih& Book. b\

Lucien Paul Victor Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin; and Walter Ong. Ramus, Method and

the Decay of Dialogue, Bogen notes ('Some Educational implicating of Hemispheric:

Specialization.' 145!' 'Although humans of anv culture 7-0 far as we h w , hove ihe

poteniial for reading and writing, many remain non-hteraie and thus fall short of acquiring

the most special of left-hemisphere functions. Conversely, we can readify comprehend the

concept of a society in which righl-hemispher*? illiteracy is the rule Indeed, our own

society ladmilledly complex) seems 10 be, in some respects, a good exarrp'e a

scholastized, post-Gutenberg-industnalized, computer-happy exaggeration of the Graeco-

Roman penchant for propositionizing

126 Laws of Media

All men are mortal.

All dialecticians are men

Therefore all dialecticians are mortal.

Hegel's greai triad is equally a connected form by virtue of the idenuiy of

opposition, of sameness-in-reverse. He set out his writ ings in dialectical

triads comprising a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. Thus, he viewed

and reviewed history; thus, he organized his Encyclopedia, where he set

forth his triadic system, in three sections - ' Logic,' 'Philosophy of Nature,'

and 'Philosophy of Mind ' Hegel regarded thought and nature (software

and hardware, as w e say now)asopposi tes united in mind and society. The

nineteenth century, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out, regarded Hegel

as 'the possessor of a marvelous secret which enabled him to speak of all

things wi thout a thought by mechanically applying dialectical order and

connection to t hem. ' 9

Hence, the grammarian George Sterner inveighs against the sterile triad

whi le he proposes his own tetrad for translation - metaphor wri t large

This view of translation as a hermeneutic of trust (elancement), of penetra­

tion, of embodiment, and of restitution, will allow us to overcome the

sterile triadic model which has dominated the history and theory of the

subject. The perennial distinction between literalism, paraphrase and

free imitation, turns out to be wholly contingent. It has no precision or

philosophic basis. It overlooks the key fact that a fourfold hermeneia,

Aristotle's term for discourse which signifies because it interprets, is con­

ceptually and practically inherent in even the rudiments of translation.

{After Babei, 303)

9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Signs, 156 Quite a different Hegel is tn^ sub|ect of the current

'Hegelian Revival.' Merleau-Ponty notes that' Hegel is the only one who thinks tn.it h s

system can contain the truth of all the others, and the man who knew the others only

through Hegel's synthesis would not know thern at air (page 811 He elaborates 'Hegel is

the Museum He is if you wish all philosophies, but deprived of their tin-teness and pcwe r

of impact, embalmed, translormed. he believes mto themselves, bul really transformed

into Hegel We only have to see how a truth wastes away when it is integrated nto

different ones {how the Cogito, tor example, in going from Descartes to the Cartesians

becomes almost a listlessly repealed ntual) to agree that the synthesis does not

effectively contain all past systems of thought, that it *s not all that they have been, and

finally that it is never a synthesis which is both "tn and for itself" - that is, a synthesis

which in the same movement is and knows is what it knows, knows what it is, pre^en-es

and suppresses, resides and destroys II Hegel means thai as ine past becomes distant

it changes mto its meaning, and that we can trace an intelligible history D f though! n

retrospect, he is right, but on condition that m this synthesis each term rernam the whole

of the world at the date considered, and that m linking philosophies together we keep

them all in their place like so many open significations and let an exchange of anticipations

and metamorphoses subsist between them' (page 82)

127 Laws of Media

So he proposes a fourfold 'hermeneutic motion/ and emphasizes that the

hermeneutic motion is dangerously incomplete, that it is dangerous

because it is incomplete, if it lacks its fourth stage, the piston-stroke, as it

were, which completes the cycle,.. The enactment of reciprocity in order to

restore balance is the crux of the metier and morals of translation. But it is

very difficult to put abstractly.' 1 0 Whether syllogistic or Hegelian-dialectical,

for some mysterious inherent reason the triad form itself eliminates

ground. But when a fourth term is added to a triad, making a tetrad, the

form flips into a new one - resonant and appositional and metamorphic

The tetrads of Laws of Media present not sequential but simultaneous

facets of media effects. That is to say, they are right-hemisphere in

character, and each tetrad comprises two figures and two grounds in

proportion to each other. This proportion of ratios is not made of imposed

theoretical classifications (as are, say, Hegel's three terms) but are

structurally inherent in each of our artefacts and procedures. All four are

processes. The tetrads render obsolete all groundless dialectical and

systematic Marxist approaches to interpretation of social processes and

technological transformations of culture by flipping the discussion into a

kind of linguistic of real words.

The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring

logos and forma/cause up to date to reveal

analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

All words (and languages) are artefacts, each of which manifests this same

four-part structure. There are no exceptions. This is the right-hemisphere

aspect of language. All non-verbal artefacts - whether safety pins or I C B M S ,

including also laws of science and institutions - share this same four-part

logos-structure in their manifestations and effects. (The tetrad is only

applicable to human artefacts, and not, for example, to birds' nests or

spiders' webs.) 'Media determinism,' the imposition willy-nilly of new

10 Steiner, After Babel, 300 Heexplains: 'The a-pnonstic movement of trust puts us of-

balance. We "lean towards" the confronting text (every translator has experienced this

palpable bending towards and launching at his target) We encircle and invade cognitively

We come home laden, thus agarn off-balance, navmg caused disequilibrium throughout

the system by taking away from "the other" and by adding, though possibly with

ambiguous consequence, to our own The system is now off-tilt Tne hermeneutic act

must compensate' (page 300).

126 Laws of Medja

cultural grounds by the action of new technologies (e g . the imposition of

visual space and left-hemisphere dominance following our adoption of the

alphabet, or the imposit ion of the feudal system as a side-effect' of the

stirrup), is only posible while the users are 'well-adjusted' - sound asleep

The vortex of side-effects was pinned by Joyce: 'willed wi thout witting,

whorled without aimed ' There is no inevitability where there is a

will ingness to pay attention.

Insofar as the tetrads are a means of focusing awareness of hidden or

unobserved qualities in our culture and technology, they act phenomeno-

logically r From Hegel to Heidegger, phenomenologists have engaged in an

attempt to get at the hidden properties or hidden effects of language and

technology alike. In other words, they have tackled a right-hemisphere

problem using left-hemisphere techniques and modes of cognition. With

the tetrads this di lemma is resolved.

All human artefacts are human utterances, or outerings, and as such

they are linguistic and rhetorical entities At the same t ime, the etymology

of all human technologies is to be found in the human body itself; they are,

as tt were, prosthetic devices, mutations, metaphors of the body or its

parts The tetrad is exegesis on four levels, showing not the mythic, but the

logos-structure of each artefact, and giving its four 'parts' as metaphor, or

word.

The laws of media in tetrad form belong properly lo rhetoric and

grammar, not philosophy Our concern is etmology and exegesis.

Thrs f$ To place the modern study of technology and artefacts on a

humanistic and linguistic basis for the first time

4 Moreover I have one request to make. I have on my own part made it my care and

study that the things which I shall propound should not only be true, but should

also be presented to m e n ' s minds, how strangely soever preoccupied and

obstructed, in a manner not harsh or unpleasant It >s but reasonable however

(especially in so great a restoration of learning and knowledge) that I should claim of

men one favor in return, which is this. - If anyone would form an opinion or

judgment either out of his own observation, or out of the crowd of authorities, or

out of the forms of demonstration (which have now acquired a sanction like that

of judical laws), concerning these speculations of mine let him hope not that he

can do it in passage or by the by; but let him examine the thing thoroughly, let him

make some littie trial for himself of the way which I describe and lay out, let

him familiarize his thoughts with that subtlety of nature to which experience bears

witness; let him correct by seasonable patience and due deiay the depraved

and deep-rooted habits of his mmd_ and when all this 15 done and he has begun to

be his own master, let him fif he will} use his own judgment

Francis Bacon, P re face lo The Novum Organon

TETRADS

The following tetrads are presented in appositionaL poetic form. Every one

is tentative In each r the four laws are in bold face, around them there may

be glosses on one or another law

(gloss) (gloss)

ENHANCES REVERSES INTO

RETRIEVES OBSOLESCES

(gloss) (gloss)

To minimize clutter and to make the proportional relations between the

laws easier to see, the terms 'enhances/ 'obsolesces,' 'retrieves,' and

'reverses into' have been omitted.

There is no 'right way' to 'read' a tetrad, as the parts are simultaneous.

130 Laws of Med/a

But when 'read' either left-right or top-bottom (Enhance is to Retrieve as

Reverse is to Obsolesce, etc), or the reverse, the proportions and

metaphor- or word-structure should appear. (That they may appear more

readily in some tetrads than in others suggests the need for a little furthei

tuning,! The subject of the tetrad appears in the top corner

In this chapter, we have grouped tetrads according to surface charac­

teristics: first, fairly simple ones; then more complex (more glosses); third,

a few with alternate versions; and, fourth, chains and clusters. Alternates

should be considered simultaneously, as versions of each other. Chains

and clusters work through one or another law A chain forms when, for

example, one tetrad's reversal (or retrieval, etc ) provides the subject of the

next tetrad, or provides the enhancement (etc ) of the next tetrad. Clusters

form where a group of tetrads has one or another of the four laws m

common, as when several different media each obsolesce visual bias, or

retrieve oral forms, or reverse into the same mode of culture

G R O U P I :

S I M P L E R T E T R A D S

Booze

Brothel

Cigarette

Crowd

Drugs

Hermeneutics

High-Rise

Kinetic Space

Microphone/PA System

Perspective in Painting

Pipe

Refrigerator

Semeiotics

Tactile Space

Xerox

' 3 2 L a w s of Medí?]

i^RSi'Ecriva i k P A I N T I N G

single point of view

cubism: multiple points of view at once

specialism in high

definition

panoramic scanning

EHH.BEV

mask and ritual via operational process

group participation via environmental smell

contemplative inner trip

solitary smoker; need for consideration of audience

individual nervous haste

134 Laws of Media

C I G A R E T T E

calm and poise

ritual, group security

nervousness, addiction

awkwardness, loneliness

135 Tetrads

B R O T H E L

going through the mot ions

sex act as package deal

the siren as institution

dreams that money can buy

sent imen talism

hallucination for lonely hearts

involvement and privacy

A house is not a home

136 Laws of Media

S E M E I O T I C S

multi-directional

direction anarchy

cryptic total field

medievalism

runic;

myster ious r"

The Name of the Kose

EMHiREV

PETTOBS

K I N ' E T I C S P A C E

Where then' is no strain,

theiv is iW1 h^U>TV '

R.C Ctilbn^v.'ood.. JM, t^pfiysii*

dr ive

posture, pose,

pressure

gesture and jest; 'signatures oi things/

the sign

relaxation

the natural, casual

body language,

semiot ics

\

138 Laws of Media

H I G H - R I S E ( A p a r t m e n t )

Automobi le and electric

media are indispensable

ground.

solitude and crowding

catacomb

slum

community

A n apartment is not a home?

cave dwel ler

Everybody is a nobodv

139 Tetrads

R E F R I G E R A T O R

availability of wider

range of foods

leisure of cook and provider

homogeneity • of flavour and texture

dried food; salted, spiced;

principle

ol slur.i^e

t j s l e of

tn\sh food

s tomach

memory

EMMiREV

RETTOBS

140 Laws of Media

H E R M F N E U T I C S

aw.ircness of

textual dittui iUv

clarity

depth

obscurity

naïveté

profundity imagiCfsl^ innocence

simpl ist ic

interpretation

ENH|REV

141 Tetrads

D R U G S e . g . , t r a n q u i l l i z e r

in ha rmony with electric speed addict ive

tolerance of pain via instant

relief

di e-i e art form

narc iss ism

hypochondr ia

enjoy your next co ld,.

from remedy to way of life, from figure to ground

foetal security symptoms

ENH , FEV

R F 7*005

142 Laws oi Media

T A C T I L E S P A C E

up-tight; up-beat the kinetic interval ( he froze ...')

play the connected

the 'common sense';

meeting place of all the sense*

143 Tetrads

M I C R O P H O N E / P A S Y S T E M

the torch-singer,

who whispers

into everybody's ear

the inflated persona the wrap-around Miund-bubble

tor everyone to wear I'll cuckold the cockewd v\ inld

'private' individual voice

close group (tribal mode)

closed, collective space

private space, privacy

int imacy: the big band

the co/y old-fashioned orator

nightcl ub (big-mouth)

ENH i REV

RET 1 OBS

144 Laws of Media

B O O Z E

private outlook, energy and zest,

aggressiveness

group sentiment songs

depression, hangover

integral sensibility, private inhibitions

145 Tet rads

X E R O X

just as the fast

Gutenberg press enlarged

the reading public,

now the sp r td ot printing

becomes iJie speed of light iviet photographic

process

With reader as

pubbsher, [he

reading publ ic

d isappears.

the speed of the printing

press

the oral tradition

everybody becomes a publisher

the assembly-line book

The (tribal) commrtlFe via

posit ion papers 'the happening)

Famil iar i ty breeds. Consensus,

e.g., the Pentagon Papers.'

vou make V O U T own book r

books* no J o n ^ r uniform and

reportable

146 Laws of Media

C R O W D

E Qme l t i noted m

Crotod* and Power that

all c rowds have Ihese

properties, a fear

of getting smal ler

a sense that thev

are getting smaller,

and a ne^cf tu get

larger

aggregates, groups

equality and

corporate power

the many into the One

the individual, private identity

With ecologv. Eve rybody \t\

therr is a sense crowd is a

ot resources nobody; the

getting smaller c rowd is

<tra.i ptrpiiltitioii1* mask

getting much too

lar£e;

the C l u b ot

Rnrru want-; the

wor ld to get

bigger and

fears H JS getting

smaller

G R O U P I I :

M O R E E L A B O R A T E

T E T R A D S

Acoustic Space

Aristotelian Causality

Car

Cliche

Clock

Computer

Co pern lean Revolution

Cubism

Electric Light

Law of Effect

Law of the Jungle

Law of New Genetics

Maslow's Rule

Number

Pollsters

Press

Radio

Satellite

Slang

Spoken Word

Stirrup

Telegraph Press

Telephone

TV

Washing Machine

Written Word

143 Laws of Media

C A R

the ego trip

gLiing cjirfitde to he .tforuf

mobile home

alone at a drive-in mo\ie

city Uirb)

into suburb

pedestr ian:

the invader of

the motorist's pr ivacy

privacy

knight in shining armour

traffic jam corporate privacy

h orse-an d-buggy

the countrvside

with river as the mode

ot traffic flow

traffic lights as locks?

helicopter as canal control tower?

149 Tet rads

all news is pseud u-event

(Pan Boors*]!! 1

' 1 he Artillery ot the Press'

used la be level led at indiv iduals.

noi\ ^ets turned on the v\hole public

bv the t\att\ Hearsts

the aud ience is bracked

1 ir made the ne*\s '

and, mosaic oi events

ad verti^inc

garment nt abundance

£ood news

today via date-line into 'soft news'

'coverage' yesterday, the sequential

new* as corporate cU ithing

for naked egos,

for entire commun i t y

\r£> pomt-ot^ ie^

fct Tirandello's

To Llrihi- she Nalol'i

svmbol ist d iscont inuous

oral and •-tnicture

b e j d l m e s S H O L T .

On l y the paranoid

can Imd L onnections

between the items

in a newspaper

150 Laws of Media

the first c\terision-oi-earth

earth £oes inside itself

the planet

thf vibes

ecology

'Primitive man is,

inevitably, ecological '

In ['he 5aı\ige Mı mı, C Levi-Strauss

noted that the primit ive regards

ever) thing as related to everyth ing

- ¿1 condit ion we recognize as paranoia.

15T Tetrads

S A T

populat ion reverses

from content/spectator

to acEor.'participant

part icipating in

their own

aud ience participation

the crowd dynamic

the orb urbs; the globe as theatre

implosion

Nature

nature, an invent ion oi the Greeks

Lew-is Mumford ('lix finies and Civilization page 6e?j

cal led die mine the Urst completely orgaruc

enwronmen! c a b l e d by man

Like the space capsule,

the submar ine is also a

complete!v programmed env i ronment

\r\d Ihe sc jen lmc laboratory, L"

whelhLT for Pavlovian eondit ioning.

or routine controlled-cundition

exper iences.

person-to-ptrson

After manv a test, l iell has rejected

the v ideophone as sonalK' unacceptable

though physical ly feasible

dialogue

instant access to users

dialogue as gesture.

Many kids conduct whole

cornorSiit ion* without

once us ing wo rds ; rather

mumble, £ i££ ie , grunt.

153 Tetrads

' phoned - a** unreal as a

telephone conv ersation'

hang-ups - no put-down

the sender is sent

T E l

. the myth ic wor ld of rh

d iscarru le, d isembodied

intell igences you can be

in two places at o m e

privacy by universal cable access

the old barr iers between

phvsjcal spaces. there IK here

and here is there

154 Laws of Media

The vi sua) iacul ly is f issioned

oft from the other senses

Letters ai"e as-* e* tension of the treth.

the onlv l ineal and repetitive pari

of the bodv.

K i t i £ C a d m u s sowed the D iagon's teeth

and tiie> sprang up armed men '

Montaigne ielt the situation

ot print as like putting

mes^agL js m hot fit

'Amusing notion: manv things private authorship, that 1 would not want to tell the ego anvone, [ tell the pubhc,

and U.*r mv most secret

knowledge and thoughts, 1 send mv most faithful friends elitism to a bookseller's shop

JD M f rame. Montni^'h; A Hw^riiyfat, H2).

An older language i-s re iHevtd

tor use and tidied up: Rome

spoke Greek, the twelfth

centurv spoke Latin; vulgarity

becomes si iubbism for ffiv in-gruup

156 Tetrads

W R I T T E N W O K D

"...in those neutral modes of wr i t ing,

called here "the zero degree of wr i t ing,"

we can eas ik discern a negative momen tum,

and an inability to maintain it...

Colour less wr i t ing like Camus ' s . . or

conversational wri t ing like Queneau's,

represents ihu last episode of a Passion

ot wr i lmg, w hicli recounts stage hy

sta^e the disintegration ot bourgeois

consciousness-.'

(Roland liarthes, Writing Ih^nv Zero, 11)

with the corporate reading public and 'historical sense'

vulgar slang, dialects; separates composition and performance

The integral common sense'

of intcrpfav and ambiguity

¡s d i spLuvd

156 Laws of Media

re-enter the simultaneous;

exit the one-thing-at-a-rime

a co l la te nf many points

or vi'.'w: the eve used in

terms ot other senses,

moving, penetrating

Li. P icasso's £_*•_-> Dr-mo^elle* JW^'^e ' r

(ca

mul til oca Ho rial eve

the viewer Ihe making process

(the genuine fake)

the mult isensuous:

iconic image

Ihe complex '-ensibilitv nf

man v fe^ els s imu rtcineuu-.tv

The v iewer has to complete thr

image, therebv becoming co-cre,ilnr

rediscovers and up-dates pr imit ive values in evieryda\ object?

the mode of light-through

157 Tetrads

C U B I S M

(paintuig J

eg .. Picasso, Braq n<-

with no 'ob[r< t' presented,

nothing lo lo-ik -it the

painting b e c o m e a mask

tor th*- user to wear.

10 see l>v

sculpture

Icon demands an educated audience?

iconic image the non-visual

Representation: vi sua J space; objectivity

Single, fixed point of view, perspective,

foreshorten!n^. ehiaio-.curo

the passive v iewer and

p h oti igra ph i c rea J : s m

the cell tor citters to t iT in

Standing on a Paris street in 1914, watching

a parade ot mil i tary vehicles using the new

camouflage. 1'UMSMI said. 'Rraque and 1

invented that

ENH

R F I

158 Laws of Med»a

Jn his Thi ^jwisire Chord, Tonv

Schwartz e^pkirns ftisi ha\\, 'HVit* hing

television, the eve is tor the first

Time functioning like the ear. h i m

bt'gan the process of fracturing v isual

images into bits of information for the eye to receive

and thr brain to reassemble, but television completed

ffte transition h »r this rea^m it rs more n<wr.ilt - to sa v

that television is an auditory-b^sed medium Watching TV tbt brain

uti l izes the oye in the same wav it has j l w a v s used the ear With

television, the patterning oi auditory and visual st imul i is identical.'

the multisensuous using the eye as

hand and ear

the occult

one sense through another - ear

and hand through eve

159 Tetrads

the intensities of

specia l ism of the senses

the S eer

inner trip: exchange of inner and outer

radio, movie, point of view

160 Laws of Media

the Protean and transformational

' • m o s r S U i p r , s m S o f a l l the t r ibal was Ini? discos erv that

sounds never eame from one

point m space, and never retreated into themselves . ,

, , the multisensorv There was the sound, its

echo, and anolhet sound

into wh ich the first sound

melted and in wh ich it had

g iven birth, altogether an

endless pn icess ion of sounds

(Jacques l.ussevran, A'hJ There W'a* I 24>

the simultaneous, resonant,

multilocational

(he resonant interval between

figure and ground

the mode of mime-as

F.nter the

F lower People

goalless

astoniLLij;LLd

JVVhat f call the "auditorv imagination ^

the reeling tor w l lab le and rhythm, penetrating

far below the conscious levels of thought arid fueling,

invigorating every word, sinking to the most primitive <md

forgotten, returning to tho origin and bringing something back,

seeking the beginning and the t ind '

(T.5 Eliot, 'Matthew Arno ld/

The LKr'uf WvUvand The Use of Cril\n»*\ 718-14)

161 Tet rads

the Rock sound bubble is not ror

l istening to. but far wear ing

and paMieipating JJI

all the senses

at once

flat mosaic, tactil ity

the connected, rational, static, lineal, homogeneous

A C O U S T I C S P A C E

exchanges outer for

inner sensibi l i ty

i e . the civ i l ized, the detached < K'J-

Plato warred on the poets because

numesis destroved objectivity

ENHiHEtf

RETTOHS

162 Laws of Media

Slang' appl ies to rm.re than speech: of dress, it is J loud. extravagant, more showy or obtrusive than

accords with good, taskv' 182ft Sporting Magazine... 'without the slightest appearance of slang or flash

toggery about him ..' . A smart scarf, a \ ery

new hat, a slang coat and a mass ive watch-chain

{Oxford English Dietiorwy). Ou r current technologies are slang -

tetrad? e>pJore their verba) character.

A l l words, in every language, are metaphors.

' our iortcern was speech, and speech impel led us

To pur i fy the dialect of the tribe ."

'Words after speech, reach into the si lence,. '

(new) percept

unconventional feeling

S!ang e> the fr*mtr<?r <»/ perception in <>rduwv

hying - part ot the updat ing p roce^

And so each sentence

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

Wil l i shabby equ ipment ahvavs deteriorating

In ihe genera] mess ot imprecision of feeling,

L ^discipl ined ^ u ^ d s of emotion

i TS Eliot, Fast Coke r V )

Meaning: "1 he danu- of the intellect among the word*"

(h/ ra Pound)

163 "Tetrads

S U N G

Remv de Gourmont

observed (Decadence) that

cliche is what prevents language

trom becoming algebra

No ch:Jd ever made a mistake m slang?

What happens to slang when it is wn t l en?

Is it the coarse mix ot senses in slang

that is unacceptable to the l i t e ra t i

conventional concept

conventional vagueness

Belorc writ ing, all speech JS s l .mg 7

EHH | REV \

BETTQBS

164 Law^s of Med ia

t pr ivate power!

ma n -plus- horse-phis- arm on T

'Hew inventions hav ^ been so simple - i s the stirrup,

but tew ha\ e had sn i atalvtu an influence on historv

The requirements of the net \ mode ot warfare which

it made possible found expression m a new form

of western European souetv donunaied by

an ans£oi_r\K v or w ( ir r to rs endowed i% rtl? fond so they nn^ht fight m a neu and highly

special ised way Inevitably this nobility

developed cultural forms ,md patterns ot thought

ai'd emotuia m harmony with its stvli of mounted shock combat and its social posture;

as Denholm-Young has said "it is impossible

U> be j hivahou1-* without a hoi "

The Man on 1 lorsebaek, as we have known h im

dur ing thi' past mi l lennium, was made

possible b\ the stirrup, wh ich joined man and

steed into a fighting organism

Antiquitv imagined the Centaur; the early M idd le Ages

made him the master of Europe' (1 vnn White. Jr.,

•VWfft"/)/ /ffi?Fiti/fi i fititl Social Chanel-. 30^

user's weight and power

centaur

with the kmght and chivalrv.

retnev es the fabulous and adventurous,

the hieratic vs. thr hierarchic

165 Tetrads

S T I R R U P

'Fighting in

the new manner

involved large expenditures

Horses were costly, and

(corporate power ! ' l r m o L i r w a s g rowing heavier

the teudal svs iem . To meet the new vu>lence ^

of mounted shock combat In /hi

a certain Isanhard sold his ancestral lands

and a slave for a horse and swo rd .

In general, mil itary equ ipment for one man

seems to have cost about tweritv oxen, or the plough-teams

of at least ten peasant families But horses got kil led,

a knight needed remounts to be effective; and his squire should

be adequately mounted. A nd horses eat large quantities

of grain, an important matter in an age ot more slender agricultural

production than ours. '

(White, Medieval technology M<J social Change, 29)

tank

infantry

The solution was to recognize the new

ret hnology of warfare as necessitating

a new c lass structure:

'"I hose economical ly unable to hght on

horseback suffered from a socia I infirmity

which shortly became a legan inferiority'

(Whi le, MeUwrni Technology and Social Change, 30)

ENHiflEV

PETtChBS

166 Laws of Media

T h e cluck --- is J piece of ptuvtT -machinery who^i 1 "product" is seconds

and minutes, by its Lssontial nature it dissociated time from

human events, and helped create (he

belief in an independent wor ld of

mathematical ly measurable sequentcs '

(Lew is Mumtord, Technics and Civilization, IS) .

work

'1 listory as her is harped'

t james Joyce)

'The contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light,

l ike that between summer and winter, was more strongly

marked than it is in our lives. The modern tow n hardly

knows si lence or darkness in their purity, nor the effect

of a solitary light or a single distant cry.

A l l things presenting themselves to the m i nd in violent

contrast and impress ive forms, lent a tone of excitement

and of passion to everyday life and tended to produce that

perpetual oscil lation between despair and distracted joy,

between cruelty and pious tenderness wh ich character ize life

in the Middle Ages

One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises ot busy lite

and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity:

the sound of bells. The bells were in dai ly life l ike good

spirits, wh ich bv their famil iar voices, now cal led upon the

citizens to mourn and now to rejoice, now wa rned them of

danger, now exhorted them to piety. They were known by their

names big Jacquel ine, or the bell Roland. Eve r y one knew

the difference in mean ing of the var ious way s of r inging.

However cont inuous the r inging of the bells, people wou ld seem

not to have become blunted to the effect of their sound'

(J. Huiz inga, The Waning ot the Middle Ages, Kl)

history as art form cast in a

fixed chronology

the oral historv

gets ironed out

and tidied up

167 Tetrads

C L O C K

'Opposed to the erratic fluctuations

and pulsation of the wor ld lv hie was the

iron discip l ine of the rule.

Benedict added a seventh period to the

devot ions of the day, and m the seventh century, by a bul l of

Pope Sabimanus, it wa s decreed that the bells of the

monasters be rung seven l imes in the twenty-tour hours.

These punctuation rnarks in the day were

known as the canonical hours, and some

means of keeping tount ot them a nd ensur ing

their regular repetition became necessary'

iMumford, Technics and Civilization, 13).

the eternal present; the 17th century Proust:

'Sacrament of the A La Rechaclic Du Temp* I'mitt Present Moment'

leisure; bells and sundials

In the Orient,

time is Jtold'

bv smell Tather

than bv eve.

'To l ive without clocks wou ld

be to l ive forever.'

(R.L. Stevenson)

fcNHiHEV

168 Laws of Media

Who am P - Lei 's take a pol].

user curiosity The providence that's in a watchful state and insecurity Knows almost everv grain ot Plutus' gold,

F inds bottom in th'uncomprehensive deeps,

Keeps pace with thought, and almost, like the gods.

Hoes thoughts unvei l in their dumb cradles. tribal/corriorafe (Shakespeare. Trmlub and Crvb^du, 111. ii. T9h - 2Q0) State of

c o m m u n a l

awareness

The popular i ty poll as navigators

handbook tor polit icians?

169 Tetrads

P O L L S T E R S

u£.t the ground (audiencel

becomes figure (statistical profile)

the audience becomes actor

the many into the one (the typical)

privacy

Does the president really have

17 per cent more char isma than Campbe l l ' s soup?

170 L a w s of Med ia

... the «.iimc shift m Ii mésense I liai produced

Kierkegaard's The Loth i :'/ "f Dread, Heisenberg's

Uncertainty Principle, and Bohr's theory of the atom

The \hlVS presents a corporate

collage a mosaic ima^e of

todflv Bankers, Muck brokers, commnd i u brokers, and

n c ^ p a p e r s were the largest purchasers of telegraphic service.

I he rai l roads did not try lo employ the nevv device

systematical ly until the basic wire network had

been completed The Er ie railroad which began to

use the telegraph for the dispatching ot trams in

I t^ l . was The first lo do sn tMazJjch ed , Thi- RfJif.nW ,nui tht- S;>iJ: e T'ey,?"/. p ^

the presen! via date-line

mosaic image of the public

Georg von Rekesy, attempting to find a i isual image that

would p iesenl the same charailtristiLS as a cons-Mi sensibility,

chose as an example a pers ian min iature paint ing

of a betrothal';

it had the requisite flat, perspective!ess.

mosa ic and iconic sense of simultaneity.

He forgot the net\ spaper.

The newspaper is structured

as a svmbohst poem.

epigrammatic style:

the headline compression

171 Tetrads

T E L E G R A P H P R E S S

It must be remembered thai bv speeding

up [he distr ibution of ma i l , rai lroads

provided consumers with a better

substitute for the telegraph than wou ld

otherwise have been available.' (Mazhch, p 95)

dateline (today) into deadline (tomorrow)

perspective, point-of-view essay-style, detachment, objectivity

A new style appears, one of immers ion,

of h uman interest: prose that does

vour feeling for you Noth ing is

more obsolete than yesterdav's newspaper.

ENH REY

AETTOBS

172 Laws of Media

R A D I O

'diffusion' broadcast ing:

the mult i locational

access to entire planet everybody

everywhere

tribal ecological environment; trauma, paranoia

Orson Welles's

im-n-^ion trotn Mar*

world reverses

into talking picture:

audience as actors

part icipating in their own

audience part icipation

Global Village Theatre

wires and connections and physical bodies

R A D I O was an invasion ot Western

culture, phas ing out 2.5(H) vears

of culture and literacy. It

brought to the surface an

instinctive' tribal sens i t i v ih

to the dangers of alcohol...

a hypersensit iv i ty to 'the

Demon RUM.'" Rad io

was the h idden

ground to the

tigure of

retrieved

Prohibit ion.

end of rational and l ineal 1

end of Fuc l idean space 1

end ot Western time

and space

173 Tetrads

N U M B E R

pi is sessions pattern recognition

tractiomng figures

out of their ground

kinetic line of the graph

the language ot gesture

plurality, quantity

zero, blank

mere graph, statistic,

profile of the crowd

holism

mti Tval notches

math, algebra:

the h idden ground

ot number is letters

knots

symbols

tallies

RE r OHS

174 Laws of Media

II such locutions

were banished,

I r ícrattr re wou ld

become a kind <it

algebra, and could

no longer be understood

without the aid ot

long analyt ical operations'

(Remy de Gourmont, Daadeucc, 175)

new corporate

awareness

language as

algebra

abstraction semant ics d isappear

175 Tetrads

C L I C H É

îa rgon

sign language semiotics

the present (experiences)

Th is process is examined

bv Yeats m his

rag-and-bone shop:

Those maslerh.il images because complete

Cirew in pure mind, but out ot what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweep ings ot a street

Old kettles, old bottles, and a b ioken can ...

(VV.JJ. Yea ts ' l"he C i rcus An ima l s ' Desertion').

76 Laws of Media

the mechanical

code-view of life

of observable/behavioural factors

one-to-one matching

uncertainty

the 'sport'

blood will tell.

177 Tetrads

L A W O F N E W G E N E T I C S

the new dogma:

all lite-'data' or 'in formation'

are encoded in U N A and K\A

the job is to puzz le out

the code

from logical to al legorical

Animism

Vitalism

the myster ious

the unobservable

pushes aside the ecological

and environmental

178 Laws of Media

But the demand for more and much more

of material satisfactions has also been

accompan ied by a change in values

that does not tit Mas low's scheme at a l l

satisfaction of need

increased demand for satisfaction

and rewards

The crowd dvnamic:

satisfaction guaranteed,

even at four t imes the

cost to you.

179 Totrads

M A S L O W ' S R U L E

'... the closer a need comes

to being satisfied, the larger

an increment of addit ional

gratification wil l be required

to produce the same satisfaction '

economic incentives are becoming

r ights rather than rewards

'To deny a mer i t raise. Or to grant onlv

a smal l one, becomes a punishment'

(Peter K Drucker, Management, 239).

need becomes right

the need

Merit raises are a lways

int roduced as reward*?

for exceptional performance

ENH•REV

RET^OBS

180 Laws of Medra

the reward svstem

selection of a single effect

completely controlled environment

i.e., via el imination ot

variables and interplav

le.g , Pavlov)

matching ot input and output

all variables are noise'

181 Tetrads

L A W OF E F F E C T

Programmable organism

equals lobot 1

the 'well-adjusted man'

C i . behaviour ism

propaganda

ediuat io i i theory

a d v er ti sem en ts

bra inwashing

organism becomes toy

all-but-one cause for that effect

via punishment

'In same tonn or other,

the law ol effect has been

one of the most wide.lv recognized

general izat ions in the whole

of psv L ho log v The belief that

rewards and pun ishments are

powerfu l tools lor the selection

and fixation of desirable acts and the

el imination of undesi rable ones

[Postman, 1947) is almost universal,

and althoogh the law itself is usualJv

associated with the name of

Thornd ike 11911). who fir^t used this

phrase, he had precursors, e.g., Bam (l8t>H)

and Spencer 118713). who brought together

the contributions ot Assoe ia t iomsm r

Hedonism, and Evo lu t ionary Doctrine in a

ioherent torm (Joselv resembl ing

Thornd ike 's own formulat ion.

This formulation was as fol lows:

Ot several responses

made to the same situation,

those which are accompanied

or closely fol lowed bv

satisfaction to the an imal wil l,

other things being equal,

be more firmlv connected w tth the

situation, so (hat when it returns,

they wil l be more l ikely to recur;

those whu h are accompanied or

closely fol lowed b\ discomfort to

the animal wil l, other things

being equal, have their connection

with the situation weakened, so that,

when it recurs, they wil l be

less likely to occur. The greater

the satisfaction or discomfort, the

greater the strengthening or

weakening of the bond (I horndike. 1911, p 244)'

tD. Berlyne, Pleasure. Rcu-ard. Preference, hi'}).

ENhiRÊV \

RE H O B S ;

182 Laws of Media

the user is the content

Final Cause

Material Cause

the 'matter pecul iar tu

the thing/

retrieved for use

183 Tetrads

'There is no difference

that does not make

a di f ference'

Formal Cause

Efficient Cause

the mover ' or maker '

who 'paved the way '

A R I S T O T E L I A N C A U S A L I T Y 'lint it there arc several sciences of the causes,

and a different science for each different

principle, wh ich of these sciences should be

said lo be that wh i ch we seek, or the people

w h o possess them, has the most scientific

knowledge of the object in quest ion 7

The same thing may ha te all the kinds of causes,

e.g , the mov ing cause of a house is the art

ot a builder, the f inal cause is the function it

fulfills, the matter is earth and stones,

and the form is the definit ion'

(Aristotle. Mptiijikyiiw, Uook III, ch. 2, sec. 9%) .

the user again: 'definition'

m the ^ense of establ ishing

structural f igure/ground relationships,

not blueprints

As structural form,

the Causes in Aristotle's

tetrad also displav

the complementary ratios

of metaphor, si) that:

'Material is to f ina l as

Efficient is to Formal '

and

'Material is to Efficient as

Pinal is h i Fo rma l /

It is noteworthy that

the Western scientific

establishment has for

centuries opted for

exclusive use of efficient

causality, as it is the

on ly cause that operates

sequentially.

184 Laws of Media

Th i s m o w broke the tradit ional v ieu

of the integrity of t reahon,

pushed aside the whole cosmology

based on the crystal l ine spheres

and their music and resonance;

obsn]e=i:ed also sn< h sciences

as astrology and the traditional mndes

ot medicine and management,

political and social.

role of the sun as central

Arista rch us (sun-centred)

' T i s all in peeces, all confe rence gone,

A l l (ust supply, and all Relat ion:

Pr ince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,

Frsr every man alone thinkes he hath got

To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee

Norte ot that krnde, ot wh ich he is, but bee.

This is the wor lds condit ion n o w , .'

J o h n Donne, 'An Anatomie of the World')

185 Tet rads

• - — —

T H E C O E E R N I C A N ' R E V O L U T I O N

asserted that the sun,

and not the earth,

was The centre ot our

solar system

From centralism mio decentralism

Centres everywhere

and margins nowhere

relativity

the earth

ENM RET

BEY OBS

186 Laws of Media

i[j .'pr irk'jr

r\ow ~a r rff ı -H -

THE MOL i ti

And /rçirK ' í r f j r rt?uNı' \s N Í J V Í I P * Z

îriıri 'z h i ı'MrıJ -

fu Chinese Written Charaeter:,, Their Wit and Wisdom by Rose Quong

Wi thout language thought is a vague uncharted nebula.

There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is d ish m l

before the appearance of language'

d e Saussure, C ia rse m Cae1 al Linguistics, 112í

The Pj?arr i*í yrnWr r ;ıj|i;Wc"ıio'

and jx^L'ii tt^t >¿AP<JÍ V *h% ííírAJ ¡"f

tUer brother 7L

ami KJU** J2irtJM if - rW N* -

PI C tK BKIJ J UFR

* SFNtOR

Outering of self: Logos: utterance that transforms;

that JS

shaping

and shar ing

the wor ld

The word a* e ocariw- po^er

not a sign

a new VOKTHX

o I energy replay of

perception and experience

a raid on the inarticulate

The Nummrshst has lost the primit ive's integral awareness

Esk imo savs

how wou ld 1 know wal rus unless Uhe word)

wal rus i t w wal rus

Psychological ly our thought apart from its expression

in w ords - is on ly a shapeless and indistinct mass'

iSaussure, Course in (General Linguistics, 111).

'We had the expern ni r but missed the meaning.

A nd approach tu tin- meaning restores the < -xpiTi.nee

In a different form [JS FboL 'The DTV h a ^ e s N '

M E A N I N G - 'The ciar\c of the intellect among the words"

(Ez ra Pound)

187 Tetrads

S P O K E N W O R D

Slang and cliche are what prevent language from

becoming algebra. They dispense wi th .semantic

content and retrieve gesture

I .anguaj;e is made oí word* and gesture in modes ot motion

Words are made of motion., made of action and repose, at

whatever remove; and gesture is marie of language - made

of the laaiguagu beneath or bevond or alongside of the

language ol wurds. When the language of words fails,

we resort to the language of gesture ...When the

language ot words most succeeds, it becomes gesture in its words '

(R.P. Blackmur, /atiguageu* Gesture, 3).

cliché solidifying meanings via recydage

Before writ ing, no s lang/al l is s lang

integral gesture

...our concern was speech; and speech impielled us

to purify the di¿U\t of the tribe.'

music begins to atrophy

when it departs too tar from the dance,

poetry begins W\ atrophv when it #ets too

far from music' (F/.ra Pound, The ABC u\ Reading, 14).

1 understand the Uirv in vour words

but not the words'

manac led, an Italian becomes speechless

Word-., .irter speech reach

Into I ho silence. Onlv by the f"rm, the pattern

Can wo rd i or music rca< h

J"ho stillness, as a Ch inese >ar *.hll

Moves pL-rpctuallv in its sti l lness

\.~iS Eliot, 'Burnt Norton V )

'Spí/aL that 1 may know thee'

ENM HE V •

RETTOBS /

188 Laws of Media

' . . VLUI teM me wh^t it is you

say (he computer um"t do and

I'll bui ld \ mi <mr that wil l do it ..."

(harried designer)

S i*-gunsand sil icon

Us ing raw materials suppl ied by 1 lo l lvwood, most ol ns formed,

in our chi ldhood vears, an image of the sherift T in typical sheriff

was lean, tough, a rmed, and frequently on the •ode ol ihe angels

J ie was Irving, agninst heaw odds to establish law ,md order and

it this mean] J r a n jng lu-> gun, w e l l he killed mi\v w j ih reluctant e

The morality p L u s in winch he participated der ived their strength

from the s imphcitv of [he < dntlit t between good ond CM I, and that

was |ust tine bv a MX-Vear-old movie-goer

That sort of sherifi, however, t ame from an era that really never

was If it had been, it wou ld have been over bv now - mowed

down bv a steady stream of electrons and citv si l icon The sheriff 's - —

office with the rickety t hair, the barred cells at the back, and the

strong smell of sweat ing horses, has been supplanted bv one with

a memory hank, attached lo a printer, l inked to county hie**

The fastest data retnev.il m the West now e l i t e s awe along the

two-dimensional M idd r ot saloon doors, thr hotel w i lh Ihe bal-

conv, V\ells Pargo gunsmith, blacksmith. W ing i ng cowb '^s . hired

guns, hi tching po-its. and horse troughs Scuttlebutt around the

poker game has it that the enmputor has a taster dravs than the

••henft", but that it tires mdis* r immale lv and with errata aim. Thev

wonder who would wa lk ^iwav from d showdown.

Well, todav thev need wonder no longer. There are reports from

the United Stales that a computer was recently lelt in smok ing

ruins, plugged by bulk Is from (he sheriff's gun. Some say it was

murder; others are n inr r incl ined to a finding o l justifiable com-

poticide because, at the time of its death, it was nnconlrol lablv

spewing out arresl record? "

J he sheriff of old is ,i man ol considerable patien, r and c o o l n e ^

but he is, above sill human. Thus, i\ hen he tmds himself up to his

holsters in printed detail ijf every offender for mi les around, pour­

ing from an incontinent computer, he has no alternative but to put

a bullet in its brain. Someune, after all, has to demonstrate where

the authority reallv l ies

There isn't a jury m the land that wou ld send h im to jail

Editorial in The Globe and Mail (Toronto, July 14, I T O f , p. 6.

speeds of calculation

and retrieval

perfect memory -

total and exact

proieciions i»t present as future,

of future as present,

refnei aL or now as aMtime

199 Tetrads

C O M P U T E R

C ,eneral Systems

anarchy via the overlay of bureaucracy

sequence, approximation, perception, l h e present

obsolescence

or hardware

via tile new

ethereal t zing speeds

and si^e-h,

e g micro-dot librarv

mn iu l r programs

190 Laws of Media

The wash i ng mach i ne i l lust rates a

s im i la r phenomenon . N o one who

has ever laundered a sheet by hand,

and without the benefits of hot run­

n ing ^ater . wou l d w_inl to return

to the scrubboard and tub But the

p o p u l a r i t y ot the e l e c t r i c h o m e

washe r in the 1920s doomed both

the l aund ress and the comme rc i a l

l a und r v In the proi_ess. the t ime

spent on laundrv work bv the house-

wite wLhu had previous.lv emp loyed

such serv ices was bound to increase

The electric washer a lso meant an

upgrad ing of household cleanl iness.

Men gave up removable collars and

cuffs, wh i c h meant that the who le

shi r t had lo be w a s h e d and then

ironed Homemake r s began chang­

ing two sheets every week, instead of

mov ing the top sheet to the bottom

and adding onlv one that was fresh.

In the late 1950s, w h e n synthet ic

no- iroii labrics were introduced, the

s-ize of the household laundry load

i nc reased aga in : sh i r t s , sk i r ts and

b l o u s e s that had one:*? been sent

to the dry c leaner were now being

t ossed in to the h o u s e h o l d w a s h

baske t By the 1980s the a ve r age

homemaker, equipped now with an

au toma t i c wa she r and dryer , was

p rocess i ng rough l y tt?n t imes the

amoun t ot l aund rv that her moth¬

er had been accus t omed to doing.

Drudgery had d isappeared, but the

laundr\ hadn't.

- Ruth Schwartz Cow, i n r

' '1 ,ibour-Saving" Means Mo ie Work,' 7S

speed of doing laundry

antiseptic house

ideal container

191 Tetrads

W A S H I N G M A C H I N E

involvement

process: continuous laundry

scrubboard and tub

ENH,HEV

192 Laws of Media

The law of the jungle

- where there is no law

kill or he killed

kangaroo court

IVIK h law

'Nature red m tooth and dav\'

tTennvsonl

lawlessness

artlessness noble savage

Power politics:

'When Tack meets with Pack in the jungle,

and neither w i l l go from the trail,

Lie down till the leaders have spoken

- it may bo fair words wi l l prevail.'

(R. Kipl ing, Vic Scumd jungle Book)

off with restraint 1

' larzan's last veil

'Who greased mv vine?'

193 Tetrads

L A W O T T H E J U N G L E

Surv i va l ot the fittest

i.e.. surv i va l of the surv ivors

Law arid

ordure (ordeal)

equilibrium

everybody and everything

i' FHH ftfcV 1FT OBS

194 Laws of Media

E L E C T R I C L I G H T

Without Ed ison, we'd be

watching I V by candlel ight

Figure and ground

merge - inner trip

Home r

and Milton

specialist knowledge

as flashlight in the tace

atter such

knowledge, what

forgiveness?

bl inding light vs.

organized ignorance

organised ignorance suriaces as

figure revealing h idden ground

space as visual figure blinding: outer light to inner, and turns it into ground seer

daytime activities: the non-visual night baseball, etc.

puts outer (sun)l ight inside,

enabling, e.g., brain surgery

l imitation by night and day

candles, lamps, oil and gas

G R O U P I I I :

A L T E R N A T E V E R S I O N S

Airplane

Credit Card

Romanticism

Symbolist Poetry

Visual Space

Wine

f 96 Laws of Medra

C R E D I T C A R D

m t h the credit i ,ird.

the publ ic is poured

into thu computer,

as iniormal ion

vou treed another card to

val idate \ i iur card

loss ot nard is loss ot

ident iH: requires lhat

you make a iiuw persona

image of user barter -inflation

corporate services awareness

audience credit card as stage

computer as tribal

memory bank

money

usei"r t ramael ion, and goods

ill ike are obsoíeMod mid

become information and miager\

197 Tetrads

C R E D I T C A R D

masks that

nionov *an buy

great danger is loss of

face

the i orporate image

the t reditor as cop

private imagery bankruptcy

barter, haggle money, the body

nothing fixed beforehand1

the identities are as fluid as the haggle

the breakdown of hardware

bargain hunting ot t upation

of the rich

198 Laws of Media

O! g C n i U S . p tWit ' T ,

i. Tea lion and di\ JJUIV iNelf

1 have been speaking. tor my theme has been

What passed within me Nol ol outward signs

Done visible for other minds, words, signs,

Symbo ls or actions, but of my own heart

1 lave 1 been speaking, and my youthful mind.

O Heavens! how awfu l is the might of souls.

A nd what thev do wi th in themselves whi le vet

The voke of earth is new to them, the wor ld

Nothing but a field where thev were sown.

UVi lham Wordsworth. T h e fVelude/ 1 0 : 173 - S 3 J

Tor not to think of what 1 needs must lee),

But to be still and patient, all ] can.

And hapJy by abstruse research to steal

Prom m\ own nature all the natural man

Th is wa s my sole resource, my oniv plan:

Till that which suits a part infects the whole.

A nd now is almost grown the habit of mv soul.

(Samuel Tavlor Coler idge. 'Dejection,' S? - 3) individual

hyperaesthesia; spontaneity or

emotion

Nature as poet; as analogue,

O 1 the one Life with in us and abroad, way of seeing Which meets all motion and betornes its soul.

Al ight m sound, a sound-like power in light,

Rhvth in in all thought, and jovance everv where -

(Coler idge I he hol ian Harp.' 26 -

K » ) have learned

To look on nature, not f*s jn I he hour

Of thoughtless \oulh but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad mus ic ol humanity.

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. A nd I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the jov

Of elevated thoughts; A sense subl ime

Of something far more deeplv interfused,

Whose dwel l ing is the light of setting suns.

And the round ocean and the l iving air.

And the blue skv and in the mi no" of man:

A mul ion and a spjri l thai impels

Al l thinking things, all objects of all thought.

A nd rolls through all things

(Wordsworth, T i n tern Abbey/ 88 - 101)

i.e., m ne ring ot the

Book of Nature'

'The Pansv at mv feet

Doth the same tale repeat

(Wordsworth, 'Intimations

ot Immortality,' 54 - 5)

199 Tetrads

R O M A N T I C I S M

The awfu l shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us - visit ing

Th is var ious wor ld with an inconstant w ing

A s summer w inds ...

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, ' H y m n to Intellectual Beau tV 1 -41

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget...

... for I wil l fly to thee.

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

Bui on the v iewless wmgs of Peesv

Though the dul l brain perplt-

and retards..,

(John Keats, 'Ode to a Night ingale/ 21, 31 -4 )

solipsism; abstractness; gush, just sentimental ism

Rhetoric, 'technique' (18th centurv) - via antinomiarmm

Hence, viper thoughts, that toil a round my mind.

Real i ty's dark dream'

1 turn from you, and listen to the w ind.

Which long has raved unnoticed.

(Coler idge, 'Dejection/ 94 - 7)

I still had loved

The exercise and produce of a toil.

Than analytic industry to me

Mnn- pluasmg, and whose character I deem

K rrrorepoeln• <i\ resemWmg more

Creat ive agency

(Wordsworth. 'The Pre lude/ II ^77 - 82>

200 Laws of Media

I he Inner Eve:

! wandered lonelv

as a c loud.

r . . a steadfast peaie ..

So once it wou ld have been, 'tis so no more:

] have submitted to a new control.

A power is gone wh ich nothing can restore,

A deep distress hath humani/ed mv Soul.

(Wil l iam Wordsworth. 'Peel t astle/ 32 - 6)

e.g., Samuel Taylor Coler idge's

'Frost at Midnight' or Keats's 'Ode on a Grec ian Lrn'*>

epiphanic aesthetic moment;

'negative capability'

synesthesia in high definition

Wordsworth remarked.

'I was otten unable to

think ot external things as

hav ing external existence,

and I communed with all

that I saw as something not

apart from but inherent in,

my o w n immater ial nature

201 Tetrads

R O M A N T I C I S M f that ;-i'rsion >

I he aw tu I shadow of so mi' unseen Power

f loats though unseen among us - visit ing

This var ious wor ld with an inconstant w ing

A s summer winds..

I Percv I lvsshe Sheilev, '1 K m n to Intel let tuaJ Beauty.' f 4)

Fade Mr away, dissolve, and quite torget.

.. lor 1 wil l f k to thee,

Not charioted bv Bacchus and his pards.

But on the v iewless wmgs of Poesv,

Though the dul l brain perplexes and retards ..

(John Keats. 'Ode to a Night ingale/ 21, 31 4)

the occult

Eastern discarnate mysticism, gnostic; poet as priest

Rhetoric, 'technique' (18th century) - via antinomianism

I ience. viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,

Real i ty's dark dream!

I turn from vou, and listen to the w ind,

W h k h long h c is raved unnoticed.

(Coler idge, 'Deject ion/ 94 - 7)

.1 still had loved

The exercise and produce of a toil,

Than analyt ic industry to me r"

More pleasing, and whose character 1 deem

Is more poetic as resembling more

Creat ive agenev.

(Wordsworth, T h e Prelude/ li. 377 - H2)

202 Laws of Media

A I R P L A N E f two I ' t v ? ions )

Haven't seen vour fr iends tor mon ths 1

C o to some out-of-the-wav plot e m

Europe and tind them

just as computers create committees, MI jets

create conferences. A new kind of

circulating populat ion is introduced.

vertical (and horizontal)

locomotion

aerial perspective

Each city becomes the

suburb ot olher cı t ıev

projectile

the wheel and the road

the suburb made

bv the car

203 Tetrads

A I R P L A N E

'On tin' verv dav that the Wright brother? took wing, news-papers refused to report the event, because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themsek es to believe it had happened. Atter all, a famous American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the world that "\o possible combination of known substances, known forms ot ma(.hmer\ and known forms of forte, (.an be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances'" (Alvin Ioffler, Future Shock, m).

equipoise, balance

levity: works by vacuum (above the wings) not by push

(under the wings); glide and float

air into ocean, flying into swimming

stasis, four-legged (wheeled) equilibrium

Manv times the population of big cities like Chicago and Toronto leave those places by air each year. The city functions as hotel with resident starf, maintenance crew Toronto 13 million) is host to over \9 million visitors annually; the population of Canada is the sum - 22 million.

ENM | REV

204 Laws of Media

V I S U A L S P A C E ( ttco Ï V s inn s /

Nat ional ism: private

idendtv on a corporate

scale

tin' ' inner wo r ld '

figures detat ti

from ground

créa les the

outer wor ld '

- i e , Nature

Cub i sm

Surreal ism

Locke sank into a swoon

The garden died:

C o d look the sp inn ing jennv

Out ot his side

- W B . Yeats

private aggression, goal-obsession;

specialism, objectivity, single point of view

rationalism

the (outer) world-as-plenum - a container to

be plundered, conquered, exploited.

anonymous fragmented mosaic: the crowd; conformity and i n secu ri ty; mul t ip le points of view at once; irrational is m

the tribal corporate group; the inner; 'participation mystique'

m i m e s i s

where the hand

of man never set foot

205 Tetrads

The binding of" Proteus

source of Newton ian Absolute Space,

and Car tes ian Space

V I S U A L S P A C E

The phonetic alphabet provides a

technique for translating all of the

senses into terms of just one sense,

wh ich is further isolated and intensified

bv subl imating those other senses.

return ot the ^'Oum!

oi interplay and

transformation

the continuous, connected, linear, static:

homogeneous: the eye alone, queen

of the senses.

the iconic mosaic; tactility; the eye used as ear or hand

kinetic depth perception as perspective: all senses

translated into eye terms.

the resonant multilocational, multisensory, tran s f ormatio nal

language becomes

aesthetic object mimesis

the animate universe

EHH i HEV

206 Laws of Media

W I N E (Two Vers ions !

W I N E

grape juice via cooking wine

fermentation vinegar ritual th e c o mmo npl ac e

observance flavours

W I N E

food the occasion

festive spontaneity

of speech and gesture

hangover^ insult

inhibition

207 Tetrads

S Y M B O L I S T P O E T R Y ' t h M* l> VC r' í i p i •!"

S Y M B O L I S T P O E T R Y

image-less the image pure sound

multisensory logic awareness

Finnegans Wake

S Y M B O L I S T P O E T R Y

reader as tyrant role of reader as solipsism

co-creator robot ism

discontinuity classical/Augustan objectivity

S Y M B O L I S T P O E T R Y

poet or seer; in w i t Hermeticism

percept the occult

Homer: poet editorial poet as teacher concept

EN H.A E V

HETTO&S ,

G R O U P J V :

C H A I N S A N D C L U S T E R S

A Loop

Hyperbole and Litotes

Clusters

Feminist/Suffragette

The Trivium

Chains

Aristotle: Law of Motion/Impetus

Einsteinian Space-Time Relativity

Newton's Laws or Motion

H Y P E R B O L E A N D L I T O T E S

H Y P E R B O L E

grand ne s s, size

iconic awareness,

involvement

litotes

literal/realistic scale

L I T O T E S

smallness, size

iconic awareness,

involvement

hyperbole

literal/realistic scale

ENH|REV

R E T W S

210 Laws of Media

F E M I N I S T / S U F F R A G E T T E

F E M I N I S T

( e x t r e m i s t )

matriarch male

corporate identity

individual sexes

the tribe of women

S U F F R A G E T T E

I'm a person too,

you know.

individual rights,

identity

'women's l ib' the tribe of women

equality responsibility

'weaker se*' featherbrain male monopoly

ENhiREV n i M

«ET'OBS

211 Tetrads

T H E T R I V I U M

G R A M M A R (scripture)

(interpretation)

literature writing and tradition

logos the logos spermatikos

as art

the word as seeds,

bur ied deep

R H E T O R I C

advert is ing

speech oratory

logos the logos prophorikos

as art

the uttered

word

D I A L E C T I C

phi losophy

dia-lexis 'Idea'

logos the logos hen dia the to s

as art

the word in

the m ind

ENHjREV

212 Laws of Media

A R I S T O T L E : L A W O F M O T I O N

prime mover Zeus impetus

the moral order Heraclitus animism

I M P E T U S

transitory character of motion

animism Divine Animal

Inertia - stasis

the Prime Mover

'By 13PJ-20 a run el theory of impetus, transitional between that of Aristotle and Newton s

mertial motion. Under the older concept nothing moved unless i[ were con^tanllv pushed

by an outside force. Unde r the new physical theory, things kept mov ing by means of ton es

original ly imprinted upon (hem, by ris itnpressa. Moreover, regularity mathemat ical ! v

predictable relat ionships, facts quantitatively measurable, were looming larger in men's

picture of the universe. A nd the great clock, part ly because its inexorability wa s so piavhillv

masked, its mechan ism so humanized by its whimsical i t ies, furnished the picture it is in

the works of the great ecclesiastic and mathematic ian, Nicholas Oresmus. who died in 13B2

as Bishop of Lisieu.x, that we first find the metaphor of the universe as a vast mechanical

clock created and set running by C o d so that "all the wheels move as harmoniously as

possible.'' it was a notion with a future eventual ly the metaphor became a metaphysics

ikynn White, J r , Medinrvti! Technology and boadl Chtin^v, 125).

ÖETTOBS

N E W T O N : F I R S T L A W O F M O T I O N f ecu rodw continues in it* ^ttite of rest or uniform motion until Acted upon bu some external unbalanced fone

isolation abstraction of

the figure (the body) from its ground acceleration (Second Law)

homeostasis change; interaction of figure and ground

N E W T O N ; S E C O N D L A W O F M O T I O N The net force applied to an obii\ t tyuuh the ride of change of momentum oj the object.

causative sequence continuous force

simultaneity; interaction-retroaction (Third Law)

kinetic equilibrium inertia

ENH.REV

RE HOBS

214 Laws of Medía

N E W T O N : T H I R D L A W O F M O T I O N Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

action/reaction simultaneously;

equilibrium

Euclidean geometry connections

Aristotle

relativity disequilibrium quantum mechanics

the sequential

E I N S T E I N I A N S P A C E - T I M E R E L A T I V I T Y

interchangeabil i ty of

figure and ground

the interplay and flux of space and time

the non-measurable void resonant interval

(not discovered yet)

the next Law of Fhysics

Newtonian measuring sticks

Absolute space j n d

Absolute time

5

MEDIA POETICS

When determining the principles on which his Sctenza Nuova would rest,

Giambattista Vico, the last great pre-electric grammarian, decided to use

cultures themselves as his text: 'We must reckon as if there were no books

in the wor ld ' (page 85) In shunning conventional science and returning to

direct observation of the page of Nature, Vico pursued the same course

Francis Bacon had charted in the Novum Organum, the same course Joyce

proclaimed in Ulysses as proper to the poetic sensibility 'Ineluctable

modality of the visibfe: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the

nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bfuesilver, rust; coloured signs

Limits of the diaphane (page 37), Such men are not isolated eccentrics

but links in a continuous tradition that extends from the present work back

to the schools mangold interpretation of the pie l terate poets, including

Homer and Hesiod

interpretation of The logos was ever held by the Ancients as a sure route

to w isdom: the techniques employed were etymology and symbology. The

216 Laws of Media

Tradition of grammatical and patristic interpretation by allegory has its roots

in the work of Anaxagoras and his school.

In Anaxagoras himself the allegory was probably ethical he found m Homer

a symbolical account of the movements of mental powers and moral

virtues Zeus was mind, AthenG was art But the method which, [hough it is

found m germ among earlier or contemporary writers, seems to have

been first formulated by his disciple. MeTrodorus, was not ethical but physr

cal. By a remarkable anticipation of a modern science, possibly by a

survival of memories of an earlier religion, the Homeric stones were treated

as a symbolical representaTion of physical phenomena. The gods were

the powers of nature1 their gatherings, their movements, their loves, and

their battles, were the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural

iorces, The method had tor many centuries ar enormous hold upon ?he

Greek mind, it lay beneath the whole theology of The Stoical schools, it

was largely current annong the scholars and critics of The early empire 1

From here The developmenT of the Tradition of grammatical encyloped-

ism passes through the Stoics (e g , Cornutus) to the Romans (e.g., Varro,

Priscian, Donatus, Jerome, Augustine}. 'Cornutus writes in vindication not

so much of the piety of the ancients as of their knowledge: they knew as

much as men of later t imes, but they expressed it at greater lengTh and by

means of symbols. He rests his interpretation of those symbols to a large

extent upon etymology. The science of religion was to him, as IT has been To

some persons in modem days, an extension of the science of ph/Joiogy'

(Edwin Hatch, The influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, 63) The pattern

for science had already been set by Empedocles, whose theory of the

elements was an etymological approach to the governing/informing

logos

His four elements Empedocles allegorically calls by the names»of gods and

goddesses of popular Greek religion

First, therefore, let me tell you of all that there is in The four roots Zeus

the resplendent, the life-bearing Hera, and Aidoneus, and Nesiis who

in her tears is spilling man's fountain of life

(F M C/eve, The Grants of Pre-SophtstK Greek Phtfosopfty. 342-3)

In addition to being a poet and allegonzerand etymologisT, Empedocles

was priest, physician, orator, and politician. In the work of Ernst R, Curtius is

detailed the continuity of the trivium and the quadrivium in the study of

scripture and of nature alike:

1 Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek 'cJess on Christianity, 60 1 Diogenes Laertius, 2 11, quotes Favonnus as saying thai Anaxagoras was the first To show mat ihe poems of Homer 'had virtue and righteousness tor Their sub|ect'

217 Media Poetics

It is a favourite cliché of the popular view of history that the Renaissance

shook off the dust of yellowed parchments and began instead to read in

the book of nature or the world. But this metaphor itself derives from the

Latin Middle Ages. We saw that Alan [of Lille] speaks of the 'book of

experience.' For him, every creature is a book:

Omnis mundi creatura

Quasi liber et pictura

Nobis est et speculum. (Migne, P.L, CCX, 579a). In later authors, especially the homilists, 'scientia creaturarum' and liber

naturae' appear as synonymous. [European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 319-20)

Curtius, however, mistakenly reports that this trope, the Book of Nature,

'originated in pulpit eloquence, was then adopted by medieval mystico-

philosophical speculation, and finally passed into common usage' (page

321).

The logos of creation, 'And God Said ' formed

the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book

ofNature/

The logos of creation explicitly presents us wi th the created order as a

speech in which the words are things and things are words, an awareness

central to the present work. Medieval theologians and philosophers were

simply updating the most ancient understanding of physics and cosmolo­

gy. Aristotle set forth fourfold causality as exegetical science of Nature for

dialectic, whereas grammarians would rather proceed by etymology and

manifold interpretation. Since the schools of Anaxagoras, various tech­

niques for the interpretation of wri t ten as wel l as natural texts had been

practised. It is, then, easy to see why Etienne Gilson exclaimed, 'No

wonder then that the greatest among the Church Fathers of the Church -

Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Ongen - built up theological

doctrines in which the fundamental agreement of natural and revealed

knowledge was everywhere either stated or presupposed. Yet, by far the

most perfect representative of this group was ... Saint Augustine' {Reason

and Revelation in the Middle Ages, 16).

To the patristic grammarian, the two modes of exegesis, one for each

divine text, wor ld and Writ, were in perfect correspondence. The simultan­

eity of all levels in ancient grammatica coincides wi th twentieth-century

218 Laws of Media

quantum mechanics, which is concerned w i th the physical and chemical

bond of nature as the 'resonant interval.' The acoustic simultaneity of the

new physics coexists wi th synchrony 1 and structuralism in language and

literature and anthropology, as understood in Ferdinand de Saussure and

Lévi-Strauss For St Bonaventure, likewise, 'synchrony' or acoustic and

Simultaneous structura^sm presented no problems. A few words from

Gilson's study of The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure indicates Bonaven-

ture's complete accord wi th traditions of interpretation:

S-nce the universe was offered to his eyes as a book to read and he saw in

nature a sensible revelation analogous to that of ihe scriptures, tne tradi­

tional methods of interprétai ion which had always been applied to the

sacred books could equally be applied to the book of creation Jusc as there

is an immediate and literal sense of the profane text, but also an allegori­

cal sense by which we discover the truths of faith that the letter signifies, a

tropological sense by which we discover a moral precept behind the

passage in the form of an historical narrative, and an anagogical sense by

which our souls are raised 10 The love and desire of God, so we must not

attend to the literal and immediate sense of the book of creation bur look for

its inner meaning in The theological, moral and mystical lessons thai it

contains The passage from one of These two spheres to the other is the

more easily effected in That they are in reality inseparable (page 17)

The four causes of Aristotle and the four levels of literary interpretation are

in perfect correspondence.

Formal Cause Literal level

Material Cause Figurative (Allegorical) level

Efficient Cause Tropological (Moral} level

Final Cause Anagogical (or Eschatological) level

It is hardly surprising then that present-day media analysts find it

impossible not to moralize, or that they subslituTe moralism for under­

standing. Old Science affords only ahstract method and the Shannon-

Weaver pipeline and its variants - both of these are based on left-

hemisphere elaborations of efficient cause and lack the ground that is

supplied by formal cause and by interaction with the other causes. Since

the four levels, like the four causes, are simultaneous, it is obvious that to

perform any one levé I to the exclusion of the others, as a visual figure minus

aground, is to produce grievous distortion. This goes far towards explaining

how herestes are produced, or the recent collapse and maunderings of

moral theology, or the helplessness of Old Science or philosophy to deal

wi th the new transforming ground of electric information.

Now That we have the work of Henn de Lubac [Exégèse Médiévale: les

Quatre sens de l'Ecriture), it is easier to trace how multilevelled exegesis

of scripture blended w i th the scientific work of the interpreters of the Book

21 9 Media Poetics

of the World in an unbroken tradition from the early exegetes of Homer, to

Varro, to the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon, to the Scienza Nuova of

Giambattista VicoH to the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot, from the Marriage of Mercury and Philology of Martianus Capella, to the Plaint of AJan of Lille, to

Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

As is periodically necessary. Bacon, like Vico, abandoned prevailing

scientific methodology for having exhausted its potential usefulness and

ruined the language as a tool of investigation. Dialecticians continually

strive to strip words of their resonant powers, to fix or embalm them into

lifeless, neutral signs, which is death for a poet or exegete. Interpretation

and thought are thus reduced to algebra Even without such depredations,

language is headstrong, unruly enough to disconcert even the master poet:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of Centre deux guerres -

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always detioratmg

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate - but There is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss,

For us, there is only the trying ... (T.S Eliot, 'East Coker,' V)

Or, again

Words strain.

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden.

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with the imprecision, will not stay in place

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices ...

(T.S Eliot, 'Burnt Norton,' V).

Much of the serious poet's struggle is to keep the language in good

work ing order. Francis Bacon evidently judged it wiser to circumvent the

intellectual currents of his t ime by beginning w i th the other text:

220 Laws of Media

A collection of all varieties of Natural Bodies . where an Inquirer might

peruse, and turn over, and spelf, and read the Book of Nature, and observe

the Orthography, Etyrnologia, Syntaxis, and Prosodia of Nature's Grammar,

and by which as with a Dictionary, he might readily turn to and find the

true Figures, Composition, Derivation, and Use of the Characters, Words.

Phrases and Sentences of Nature written with indelible, and most exact,

and most expressive Letters, without which Books it will be very difficult to

be thoroughly a Literatus in the Language and Sense of Nature

'Incomplete as it is/ comments Elizabeth Sewell, 'Bacon's doctrine of

forms has given rise to accusations of slovenliness and imprecision. It is

certainly not easy, but we must remember that Bacon is, after all, trying to

say something new' {The Orphic Voice, 134). In fact, his 'new' approach

was the familiar one of manifold interpretation, together with scrupulous

observation, that is r 'reading' and comparison of natural 'texts.'

With Bacon, Vico continuousiy asserts the claims

of grammar as true science precisely because

it has not yielded to specialism and method.

Sewell continues:

Nature as language appears in Vico as the central concept of ancient mytho­

logical thought: 'All of nature was the language of Jupiter. Every pagan

nation believed that it knew this language through divination, which the

Greeks called theology, which is to say, knowledge of the speech of the

gods.' Goethe in his turn thinks of nature sometimes as a sibylline language,

and makes the wonderful statement, 'Man is the first speech that nature

holds with God/ This language is not language-as-science; nor is it a code. It

is here given its full complement of metaphor and figure and myth: if

nature is language, it is language-as-poetry This is the speech which the

human mind, gifted as it is with powers of speech of its own, has to

apprehend and interpret. Insofar as man's own language is poetic, it con­

forms to the workings of nature considered under this figure of language,

(page 151!

Vico's technique is set forth in the second of his five books as the practical

heuristic application of not philosophical but poetic wisdom. For method,

'We must therefore go back with the philologians and fetch it from the

stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, from the rocks of Amphion, f rom the men

221 Media Poetics

who sprang from the furrows of Cadmus or the hard oak of Vergil' I New

Science, 89).

Vico's Science went one essential step beyond Bacon's. Meditating on

the relations between the two books, he found a new correspondence, an

interplay that raised a new 'text' for grammatical scrutiny.

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so re­

mote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a

truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly

been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within

the modifications of our own human mind Whoever reflects on this

cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies

to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone

knows, and that they should have neglected the study of the world of

nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to

know. This aberration was a consequence of that infirmity of the human

mind, noted in the Axioms, [see next quotel by which, immersed and

buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things, and

finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious; just as the bodily eye

sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself. {New Science,

85)

The new text is man's social artefacts and their correspondence to the

consequent modifications of his sensibilities. James Joyce used language

itself as the index of these modifications and explored them fully in

Firrnegans Wake. Vico brings to bear all of the resources of grammar, both

as regards exegesis of the two books and as regards the processes of

etymology: 'The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see

itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to

attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal

principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies

and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and

spirit' (page 70). This passage puts on display the standard grammatical

awareness of the correspondence of words and things, though seldom has

it been made so explicit.

As poetic (rhetorical) w isdom focuses on the sensibilities as crucial, Vico

asserts that there must exist a mental dictionary, not of abstract philo­

sophical ideas, but of concrete poetic-philological sensibilities conformal to

the things and artefacts of common experience:

There must, in the nature of human things be a mental language common to

all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in

human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as

these same things may have diverse aspects A proof of this is afforded

222 Laws of Media

by proverDS or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same

meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient

and modern

This common mental language is proper to our Science, by whose tight

linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary com­

mon to all the various articulate languages living and dead . . As far as our

small erudition will permit, we shall make use of this vocabulary in all the

matters we discuss. (New Science, 60)

Concluding his discussion of poetic w isdom, Vico accorded it 'two great

and sovereign t r ibutes/ One is 'that of having founded gentile mankind';

the other concerned the 'wisdom of the ancients,' as sketched in the

fables: 'And it may be said that tn the fables the nations have in a rough way

and in the language of the human senses described the beginnings of this

world of sciences, which the specialized studies of scholars have since

clarified for us by reasoning and generalization. From this we may conclude

what we set out to show in this (second] book: that the theological poets

were the sense and the philosophers the intellect of human w isdom' (page

265). In this last statement there echoes the tacit knowledge of the

harmony of the causes with the patristic levels of exegesis

Vico aimed to heai the rift in the trivium between

the Ancients and the Moderns.

Vico sought to avoid the faults that had accumulated in both philology and

philosophy, since they were split in the twelf th and sixteenth centuries, by

blending them:

Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true;

philology observes the authority of human choice, whence comes con­

sciousness of the certain.

This axiom by its second part defines as philologians all the grammarians,

historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the study of the

languages and deeds of peoples both their domestic affairs, such as cus­

toms and laws, and their external affairs, such as wars, peaces, alliances,

travels and commerce.

This same axiom shows how the philosophers failed by half in not giving

certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians,

and likewise how the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their

authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philoso-

223 Media Poetics

phers If they had both done this they would have been more useful lo their

commonwealths and they would have anticipated us in conceiving thrs

Science, {pages 56-7)

Vico's contemporaries we re no more able to carry forward his work than

were their successors, and so the problem has remained to this day:

'Vico's vocabolarso mentals, his mental dictionary, contains the special

letters of the book of humanity which we can learn to read by fantasia.

Galileo's magnificent art of reading degenerates into the dominance of

method and technological procedure, and Vico's art of reading the

hieroglyphics of the sensus communus of humanity has its degenerate

components in histoncism and the contemporary concern with methodolo­

gy in the humanities' (DP. Verene, Wco's Science of Imagination, 204),

In the end, it eluded him for he was caught in a dilemma that had been

building for centuries before him and that was then environmental. While

change was slow and technologies few, the matter was less important and

tess visible than n is now With our accelerating cascade of new media it is

borne upon us that each represents not an appendix to but a complete

retranslation of the Book of the World, and of the reader As W.B. Yeats

sang, in 'Sailing to Byzantium':

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling .

Vfco simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for

separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction

would be of any use Second nature is nature made and remade by man as

man remakes himself w i th his extensions. Separate them- the first is the

province of traditional grammar; the second, that of Bacon. Vico, and Laws

of Media.

At bottom, Vico insisted, because poetic wisdom deals with real things

and wi th sensibilities rather than with conceptual abstractions, it alone is

the touchstone of truth: 'So that, if we consider the matter well, poetic

truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not in conformity

w i th it should be considered false' (New Science, 66)

The key to Vico's science was the mental dictionary, the bridge between

the two books as recorded in the modulations of human sensibility. Our

four laws in tetrad-verbal - form brmg to a conclusion thrs part or the labour

of grammar begun wi th the Ancients and carried forward by Bacon and

Vico. The previous chapter of tetrads comprises the first entries in the

dictionary of real words that Vico sought; it is, as he anticipated, a 'mental'

dictionary in that it displays patterns and transformations of sensibility.

224 Laws of Media

Each tetrad gives the etymoiogy of its subject,

as an uttering or outering of the body physical

or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold-

exegetical manner.

Further, the tetrad form rs verbal in nature, consrstrng, Irke metaphor and

like every word, of two conformal situations, two figures and two grounds.

Our new dictionary includes all human artefacts as human speech, be they

hardware or software, physical or mental or aesthetic entities, arts or

sciences. Such former distinctions have no scientific relevance. As

utterances, our artefacts are submiss ive to rhetorical (poetic) investiga­

tion; as words, they are susceptible to grammatical investigation The

tetrads are verbal structures and poetic science m one. The elements of the

tetrad are proportional, using the analogical ratios of A is to B as c is to D (and

the complementary ones, A is to c as B I S to D , and the reverse of both) That

is why they must be presented and studied in the appositional form.

Enhances Reverses into

Retrieves Obsolesces

Nor do they exclude philosophy, as is evident when the tetrad examines

itself and its own four pans

The tetrad-word itself, as an artefact, presents this pattern

figure

emerging

from ground

Awareness of inclusive, structural

process

Metaphor, logos

Technology (hardware) becomes software word

Dominance logical method.

figure and

ground in

inttTt hcin^r

Formal ( J U ^ O E'f resent *, (I tj *1

poesis

By contrast, the sequential triad of dialectic (scientific) method

225 Media Poetics

H o m e o s t a s i s

Abstraction

Figuro minus

ground

Connection Homogeneity

Kujilibnu m

( »round

Polarity Complementarity

Interval, trans­formation

The visiuil

(one ^fiius)

1 111' . ICOU^tK

liisi nnlinuitv

Or again, viewed in terms of its polar thesis-anthithesis-synthesis

ContrLidntion L n i r \

Analysis

Yes-and-no dialectic;

Synthesis

Excluded middle

J ft raditus in

high definition Wwr-no logre

Aristotelian tont rant's

The tnadic form, whether typified by Hegel's polar thesis-antithesis-

synthesis or the container-structured logical syllogism, is nevertheless a

connected form that depends on a ground stress of visual space to give it

salience and validity. As a visual form, it has blinded the West to the

metaphysical and verbal properties of human artefacts as metaphors and

as extensions of ourselves. The literature on metaphor suffers equally from

the hardware approach, which sees it only in conceptual, left-hemisphere

terms. When the break with grammar and rhetoric was made at the time of

Peter Ramus the sense was lost of metaphor as perceptual technique for

seeing one whole situation through another whole situation.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates

our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness

displaces the merely visual.

Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates

experience from one mode into another Money is metaphor in the sense

that it stores skill and (about and also translates one stall \nto another. But

226 Laws of Media

the principle of exchange and t rans i t ion, or metaphor, is in our rational

power to translate each of our senses into the others: this w e do every

instant of our lives. But the price we pay for special technological

extensions, whether wheel of alphabet or computer, is that these massive

extensions of sense become closed systems. Our private senses are not

closed systems but endlessly translated into each other in that experience

which we call consciousness Our extended senses, tools, technologies,

mental constructs, through the ages have been closed systems incapable

of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very

instantaneous nature of coexistence among our technological instruments

has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and

senses now consti tute a single field of experience that demands that they

become collectively conscious Our technologies, like our private senses,

now demand an tnlerplay and ratio that makes rational coex/stence

possible, As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the

alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was

socially and psychically supportable. Now, sight and sound and touch and

movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay

among these extensions of our human functions is now necessary

collectively as it has always been for private and personal rationality

The strategy to which any modern culture must resort was indicated

by Wilhelm von Humboldt: 'Man lives with his ob|ects chiefly - in fact,

since his feeling and acting depends on his perceptions, one may say

exclusively - as language presents them to him By the same process

whereby he spins language out of his own being, he ensnares himself in it;

and each language draws a magic circle round the people to which it

belongs, a circle f rom which there is no escape save by stepping out of it

into another' (Cassirer, Language and Myth, 9). The ground that envelops

the user of any new technological word completely massages and

reshapes both user and culture. In this way too these words (extensions)

have all the transforming power of the primal logos. Westerners' only

escape or antidote has hitherto been by means of artistic enterprise All

serious art, 1o use Pound's phrase, functions satirically as a mirror or

counter-environment to exempt the user from tyranny by hrs self-rmposed

environment, iust as Perseus's shield enabled him to escape stupefaction

by the Gorgon The art historian has long puzzled over the question: at what

point do primitive cultures develop arts? Evidently the Balinese had not yet

confronted the problem when they answered, 'We have no art; we do

everything as wel l as possible/ Art is a response to a situation that has

reached a certain intensity It may well be that intensity, or paralysis, comes

about as a result of left-hemisphere stress. But at what point do developed

cultures discard their arts? - the question would seem entirely relevant to

our present condition.

In The Problem of Form Adolf von Hildebrand observed, J ln true art, the

227 Media Poetics

actual form has its reality only as an effect.' The same observation may be

made wi th respect to all human artefacts as utterances

Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns

of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads

restore poesis and the making process to the

study of artefacts.

When tetrads are made for each of the parts of a tetrad - each one a

dimension of formal cause - the metaphysical results serve to indicate the

proper bridge between grammatical humanism and dialectic.

A, Enhancement consists in intensifying some aspect of a situation, of

extending a sense or configuration of senses, of turning an element of

ground into figure or of further intensifying something already figure.

Potency into Act Final Cause

Old logos Privation of returns as alternative

new mythos potentials

B- Obsolescence refers to rendering a former situation impotent by

displacement: figure returns to ground.

Resurrect ion <'i the junk vard 1

Th row S4imtfthm£ l o w k

av,\w today'

lis Material Cause

surfaces as cliche,

junk

Act returns to potential

Awareness of ground as all

potential i ' t îhrntıal as a

ground nl h idden

[rcasuiv ,ind

opportunity: junk heap ,is

d\narmc resource Cf. Dr Johnson

on Ihe sale of Mr Thrale's brewery

this is not a mere collection of vats and

bo ı İ t rs . but the means of becoming rich

bevond the dreams or avarice!'

'A [emble beaul\

is born' iYeat^>

Retrieval mode: ground becomes figure-all potency raised into act at once

The ground of the old item

228 Laws of Ivtedía

C. Retrieval is the process by which something long obsolete is

pressed back into service, revivified, a dead disease now made safe,

ground becomes figure through the new situation

Recognition of form

Figure minus

ground

Metamorphosis Archetype Clone

The original matter

Fit? s h ,w,'ai t'Tirss,

ruHv a¡yi in for

the first time

["he bame, anew

Art form stalu-

d-inj;rr n^k or

íhe iircj;i[MÍ

ground

D. Reversal involves dual action simultaneously, as figure and ground

reverse position and take on a complementary configuration. It is the peak of

form, as it were, by overload.

Recognition ol form,

as form surfaces

V isual --pace

cont inuous sequence-evolution, et. .

,J torm of an. hetv pe or Idea

Metamorphosis: Act and potency

switch roles

Dynamic becomes static

Complementarity Efficient Cause

Interval between

mutual outline nr

figure and ground

ilTf St Thomas, NorrrmJ i luvt I 2 O 113. A 7, ad ^

C oniormal

With this in hand it becomes apparent that, as in a hologram, in the tetrad

the whole is reflected in every part. Retrieval always seems to provide the

keynote or dominant mode of each tetrad, which may explain why it is often

the most difficult of the four to discover, ft also appears, f rom the above,

that whi le the 'enhance' and obsolesce' parts seem to concern mor­

phology, 'retrieval' and 'reversal' seem to concern metamorphosis - the

embedding of one situation in another.

229 Media Poetics

New media are new languages, their grammar

and syntax yet unknown.

Every tetrad presents in Gestalt form the logos or formal structure of its

subject, whether hardware or software artefact In so doing, and because

every artefact as a human utterance has its etymology in the body it

extends, the tetrad forms an icon of the verbal nature of the artefact.

This new science of language and forms gives renewed salience to the

accumulated knowledge of rhetoric and grammar. Tetrads reunite both of

these sciences with dialectic (philosophy and logic and their children) and

point towards the development of a rhetoric of grammar as well as towards

a grammar of rhetoric, as a next stage. First, a certain amount of

accumulated misunderstanding needs to be cleared away.

As Aristotle's is the oldest extant treatise on rhetoric, it has been used

for centuries as the ur-text This is a basic mistake, for Aristotle was not a

rhetorician nor was he concerned to present the subject of rhetoric on its

own terms. He was busy using dialectic and the newly released left

hemisphere to explore and retrieve everything in sight His Rhetoric is in

reality a dialectic of rhetoric, an account in purely dialectical terms of the

activities of a rival group. His account of metaphor, consequently, is given in

terms that agree mainly with the interests of logic and philosophy, but that

make no attempt to satisfy the needs or biases of rhetoric or of grammar.

He set out to write what philosophers would find most pertinent or most

useful in rhetoric; it has been misconstrued as the 'philosophy' of

rhetoricians. Equally, his Poetics is a philosophy of poetics, that is, an

account of what a dialectician sees or finds pertinent when he brings his

tools to bear on that activity: it certainly is not a poet's handbook on poetry

or poetics.

Aristotle... wrote 'apt use of metaphor indicating

swift perception of relations'- Ezra Pound, poet's-

eye view (ABC of Reading, 84).

For Aristotle, metaphor belongs to both domains, grammar (literature^ and

rhetoric, so he discusses it in both his Rhetoric and his Poetics. It is

230 Laws of Media

Aristotle, notes Paul Ricoeur, 'who actually defined metaphor for the entire

subsequent history of Western thought, on the basis of a semantics that

takes the word or the name as its basic unit. Furthermore, his analysis is

situated at the crossroads of two disciplines - rhetoric and poetics - with

distinct goals "persuasion" in oral discourse and the mimesis of human

action in tragic poetry' {The Ruie of Metaphor, 3). It is no accident that

Aristotle chose to dissect the point of maximal interface of rhetoric and

grammar, dramatic poetry. The heart of the discussion is found, as noted

earlier (page 120), in the Poetics (1457b, 6-9):

Metaphor consists in giving the thing a n ame that belongs to something

else, the transference being either from genus to species or from species

to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy i

Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure But

metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing m terms of another. The

concepts come after, often long after, the percepts. On closer examination,

we find that Aristotle's celebrated anatomy of metaphor has nothing to do

wi th metaphor itself, it is instead an anatomy of synecdoche.

Synecdoche is exactly this kind of name-swapping and sort-crossing it

consists of using (naming) the part for the whole or the whole for the part¬

genus and species. It is exactly metaphor minus its ground-eiements Only

one of the four kinds of metaphor mentioned by Aristotle is actually

metaphor: the one 'on grounds of analogy.' As he expands, in the same

passage in Poetrcs,

Analogy or proportion is possible whenever there are four terms so related

that The second (B) is to The first (A) as the fourth ( D ) T O the third [c'\: for

one may then metaphorically put o m lieu of a and B in lieu of D Thus a cup

is in relation to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares, The cup accordingly will

be . the 'shield of Dionysus,' and the shield the 'cup of Ares.' Or to take

another instance As oid age is to frfe, so is evenrng to day One wtll

accordingly describe evening as the old age of the day' - or by the Em-

pedoclean equivalent: and old age as the 'evening' or the 'sunset of hie '

(1457b. McKeon, Baste Works. 1477)

2 AnsioTle, Poetics, 1d57b 6 9: in McKeon. The Baste Works ofAnsicVc, 1476 Ansiotle

immediately illustrates 'Thai from genus to species .s exempli tied in " Here standi • r>v

ship"; for lying at anchor is the "standing" of d particular Kind of tnmg That from species

to genus in "Trulv ten thousand good deeds has Ulysses wrought," where "ten

thousand," which is a particular large number is out "n place of the generic "a i^rge

number." That from species to species m " Drawing the hfe with Th£ bronze, and >n

"Severing with the enduring bronze", where the poet uses "draw in tne senbe o*

"sever" and "sever" in that of "draw," both words meaning to " takeaway" something'

(1437b; pages 1476- 7}

231 Media Poetics

He saw the same four-part analogy or proper proportion in psychological

operations and in perception:

With what part of itself the soul discriminates sweet from hot I have ex­

plained before and must now describe again as follows 1 That with which it

does so is a sort of unity, but in the way just mentioned, i.e , as a con­

necting term. And the two faculties it connects, being one by analogy and

numerically, are each to each as the qualities discerned are to one another

(for what difference does it make whether we raise the problem of discrimi­

nation between disparates or between contraries, e.g., white and black?)

Let then c be to D as A is to a: it follows alternando that C . A . . D . B . If then c

and o belong to one subject, the case will be the same with them as with

A and B ; A and B form a single identity with different modes of being; so too

will the former pair. The same reasoning holds if A be sweet and B white.

{De Anima. 431 a-b; McKeon, Basic Works. 594)

Perhaps the confusion is understandable when another set of ratios is

examined.

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the

matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

Metaphor has three companions: together they form the foundation of the

'figures' - the schemes and tropes of classical eloquence. Vico terms

metaphor 'the most luminous and therefore the most necessary and

frequent' of the figures' (New Science, 116). Next in order of importance

and priority he places synecdoche and metonymy (page 117). 3 The former

3 Each figure of speech adjusts the sensibility of the user in the process of bringing il to bear

on the content

Metaphor presents one thing or situation dressed as or seen through another A

leap has to be made, across the interval between the two situations, each composed o* a

figure and ground.

Synecdoche presents the part for the whole or whole for part 'All hands on deck 1 ' .

'The law is on the way'. 'The grape was my undoing ' It is an oblique manner o' speaking

Part for whole or species for genus (a scalmg-downf- 'hands' for 'helpers', 'bread' for

'food' (our daily bread), 'wheels' for 'car.' A material may present what is made irom it

'grape' for 'wine'; 'threads' for 'clothes ' Whole for part or genus for species 1 scaling up)

'Canada Beats Russia in Best-of-Five Series', 'arms' for 'rifles' or 'missiles', 'tne law' for

a policeman

With synecdoche, a thing is seen in some greater or lesser aspect of tself. so The

232 Laws of Media

is quantitative and abstract (part for whole, genus for species); the latter is

qualitative (attribute or quality for thing, agent for act) and can move in the

direction of abstract iconography, such as Jugly Poverty/ Jsad Old Age.'

but at thjs extreme it flips into a different figure, prosopopoeia (personifica­

tion). Last in order of development is irony, 'Irony certainly could not have

begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of a falsehood

by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth' (page 11 8).

Moreover, these four stand in the familiar analogical relationship:

Though indeed the complementarit ies are present, this quartet or grouping

is not a tetrad. That is, it does not analyse some artefact of which

synedoche is the obsolescence phase, irony the reversal, and so on Yet

the ratios are present. The left side of the group is integral or right-brain in

structure: metaphor uses two figures and two grounds metonymy uses

qualities, which do not admit of fragmenting or measurement but are

pervasive, aspects of ground, as it were. The right side of the group is

fragmentary or lefl-brajn in structure: synecdoche is part-whole quantifia­

ble, irony 'splits' in another way. Irony splits figure from ground and splits

figure is quantitative and connected, continuous rather than discontinuous. It is tne most

visual and left-brain of the figures No leap is made, the thing is shil there, and only -i

writ large oi small Litotes understatement) and hvperbole lover statement) are among The

firstborn of synecdoche

Metonymy presents for the thing either its quaky or attribute or sameth.ng cluiely

related to it. Metonymy's rather loose, nght-bram nature nas caused great confus o-i

among the literati what synecdoche is to the left brain metonymy is to the right1 'Here's

Mr. Big'; 'We are loyal to the crown'; 'I owe allegiance to the flag'. 'Amazement

seized'The rebel thrones' (Milton); 'The pen is mightier than the sword' •iBulwer-Lyiron'i

'Her voice is lull of money' (Fitzgerald!; 'He Tills with piercing steel at bold Mercuiio *

breast' {Romeo ana'Juiiei) However. St Pa jI does a meTonvmic two-step when ne spea- c,

ot 'preaching the cross,' the cross being an instrument of crucifixion and the crucifix on of

Jesus the means of redemption he meant preaching redemption Such double metonymy

is called metalepsis

Irony (Greek, eirone/a. dissimulation, playing dumb) plays with double s gmfıcatıon it

may work by reversal or by using terms of praise to imply condemnation or contempi

'That's |uşl wonderful, thai is'. 'A fine state oi affairs': 'For Bruius >s an honourable man

Uulius C^esarj. 'Honest I ago' {Othello) Ironv can also lean towards sarcasm or ridicule 11

can be situational - remember Life's Ltttle ironies? - and include most of what we coil

poetic justice in dramatic irony, characters on the stage are aware of but one meaniro of

their words or actions (or both), and the audience of that and of another, often malign,

significance

Metaphor irony

Metonymy Synecdoche

233 Media Poetics

the consciousness of the knowers. On the stage, lor example, an irony will

have one meaning (restricted) for the character, another and fuller one for

the audience (and perhaps for some other characteis as well}, though the

words - figures - are identical. Thus:

figure/ground

figure/ground

Metaphor

figure/two grounds

rony

ground/ground

Metonvmy Synecdoche

figure/figure

Top-bottom resonance is preserved as wel l : the top row is two-levelled,

the bottom row r in higher definition, is one-levelled (no play between figure

and ground).

Aristotle's confusion is not only understandable, it points to a discovery

of the first importance Since dialectic derives from the mterionzed logos

(the logos hendiathetos in the mmd before speech and minus hearer) it

works by abstracting figures from their grounds in order to isolate essences

and pure f o rms- the good, the beautiful, the right arrangement, the test for

truth Viewed thus, stripped of its grounds, metaphor ts synecdoche or

metonymy. (Metonymy, wi th its qualities in high enough definition that

they approach the intensity of quantifiable figures, may account for

Aristotle's species-to-species and genus-to-genus types.) By another

route, the further confusion wi th simile can be accounted for.

Dialectic - logic and philosophy - represents in

the trivium the extreme of left-hemisphere

operation as it uses no ground but alphabetic

writing itself

The left brain provides both abstraction and sequence, and dialectic is justly

famous for its ab^ity to generate long sequential chains of logical argument

and of philosophical reasoning. Yet metaphor, wi th its apposition of double

figure and ground, is formally discontinuous and resonant However, put it

into the left brain, raise The definition to figure-figure level, and the

metaphoric 'The lion of Athens sprang on the foe' or some such

234 L a w s of Media

i m m e d i a t e l y c o n v e r t s into ' H e s p r a n g l ike a l ion' { s im i l e /ana logy^ or into t he

e x t r e m e ' H e is a l ion ' ( copu la ) . T h e las t t w o a r e c o n n e c t e d a n d l inear. T h e y

a r e no t at all m e t a p h o r , bu t t h e y are w h a t t h e left b ra in p r o d u c e s w h e n it is

g i v en m e t a p h o r to p r o c e s s in its t e r m s . S o r A r i s to t l e , in the Rhetoric:

The simi le a lso is a metaphor, the d i f ference is but slight W h e n Home r says

of Achi l les [Iliad 20 164),

He sprang at the foe as a lion,

that is s imi le. W h e n he s a y s of him. T h e lion sprang at them,' it is a meta­

phor; here, s i n ce both are cou rageous, the poet has t ransferred the

name of '/ton' ro Achd/es Simttes a re 10 be emp lo yed m the same way as

metaphors, f rom wh i c h they differ only in the point |ust ment ioned (1406b,

3 4; Lane Coope r t rans , 1921

A bit later, h e e x p a n d s :

The simi le, as w e sa id before, is a metaphor, differing from it only m thai

the simi le adds the ph rase of compar i son, wh i ch m a k e s <[ longer, and h e n c e

l e s s p leas ing. Nor d o e s it, like the metaphor, say 'this is that', and hence

the mind of the heare r does not have to s ee k the resemb lance, [The s imi le

being longer, us ing mo re words, you do not learn the s a m e thing so

rapidly f rom it as f rom the metaphor and. being explicit (saying 'this 15 like

that'), does not bring, as d o e s the metaphor, the eas y and pleasant oper­

ation of finding the r e s e m b l a n c e - w h i c h is implicit m the metaphor ] [Rheto­

ric, 1410b, 3.10; Cooper , 207)

A l t h o u g h h e e r r s in ca l l ing s im i l e , m e t o n y m y , c o p u l a s , a n d s y n e c d o c h e

t y p e s of m e t a p h o r , A r i s t o t l e is a s u s u a l b e i n g c l ea r a n d p r e c i s e . T h a t i s r h e

r epo r t s That, u n d e r l e f t - h e m i s p h e r e v i s ua l s t r e s s of a h igh o rde r , m e t a p h o r

t r a n s f o r m s e i t h e r into t h e c o n n e c t e d f o rm , s im i l e or copu l a , or into t he

a b s t r a c t f o rm , s y n e c d o c h e . In o t he r w o r d s , ou r g r a m m a r i a n s ' qua r t e t of

f i g u r e s , w h i c h is no t a t e t r ad but w h i c h still e xh ib i t s the p ropo r t iona l

r e l a t i ons , b e h a v e s t h u s .

f /g . f /g f/g/g

M e t a p h o r —*lrony

1 \

M e t o n y m y S y n e c d o c h e

g/g w

Of t he f ou r b a s i c f i g u r e s of s p e e c h , o n e (me t apho r ) , u nde r v a r i o u s k inds

a n d d e g r e e s of s t r e s s , t r a n s f o r m s into t h e o t h e r s . T h e y , in tu rn, in s i m p l e

ope r a t i o n o r u n d e r s t r e s s , i n t ens i f y t h e ope r a t i o n of, a n d d i s p l a c e , re t r ieve,

a n d t r a n s f o r m into, y e t o the r f i g u r e s of s p e e c h M e t a p h o r i tself (one

s i t ua t i on t h r o ugh a n o t h e r ) :

235 Media Poetics

M E T A P H O R

t'piy llu>n

outlint'

m vthu"

. l l k ' ^ O t V

ground

ratio, interval between the

two situations

transformation/ transfiguration

connection concept

rational experience

ti^u ro

tn>h .iri'iloss

via nu'iit/il

mimesis

logos

I Hvpoai le lecteur..

literal, I .nnnoi tod,

Läe^ik nyitn e

S L I l l l l i '

Ivrii.

dr.uiiLitie

The tetrad can be employed to reveal how these first-level transforma­

tions occur as one or another aspect of the harmonic balance of metaphor is

stressed or distorted. First, when the resonance of figures is pressed to

intensity of operation so that they merge and unite into one figure, leaving

the two grounds, irony results. This tetrad gives the stress pattern.

l K O N \

para 11 e Is to iden t ity o f extreme figures

ground as hidden four-part resonance

thv otvull motaphor

tlio k no wer

Should, instead, the analogical ratios be flipped over so that elements of

ground, pervasive qualities, emerge into attention, metonymy is born. The

stress pattern:

236 Laws of Media

M E T O N Y M Y

ignore qualitative qualitative as figure

resonance as matching

four-part resonance

\ itrrosponiirncv mr tapho i

At the other extreme of formal stress, ground and quality are completely

ignored and quantity reigns: synecdoche. The anatomy of this transfor­

mation;

S Y N E C D O C H E

(samt ^'iiu^- or -.poi_k-

(minii^i grounds)

acoustic ratio homogeneity of figures of figures v i a v i s u a l q u a n t i r y

resonance as matching four-part resonance

melaphor

This might be regarded as the basic pattern of all visual stress, via the

alphabet, on language By pursuing the identical pattern one step farther,

we discover how Aristotle came to regard the abstract, connected form,

the copular 'is,' as metaphor. Again, the stress pattern (the process of .4

C O T L L A R ' I S '

generation]:

figures unity, connection

resonance as grounds; four-part matching resonance

metaphor

d n tv ol fi^nt*.s

4 This shows only the process of generation: the actual t^irad for 'is' itself differs somewhat

being, non-being, is-not;

hi^h definition " luv\ d a m n u m

identity

interval

uncertainty

237 Media Poetics

Use the tetrad for vivisection ol each of these fundamental figures of

speech to see how the next generation is derived

M E T O N Y M Y

iju.iliU as figure

the r i i j ï l

brain

vio MK1 k-ft

figurative, in high definition

connotation

*tfpjL"f

epithet, OT analogy

multilevel whole

m i t.ïphor

I R O N Y (ir: iiJIrgoiA

f(i ra maticé

figurative, in high definition

(dramatic ironv

narrative

ambiguity (denotes and

connotes)

the straightforward

•telpher

A m , i r v

a t t i v t '

literal in

S Y N E C D O C H E

tablr

figurative, in simile. . . p r.p.-tu. s,/, high definition tautology-

denotation integrity of whole

der.ul metaphor

238 Laws of Media

In each case, the reversal phase discloses a spectrum of new figures,

ranging in scale f rom individual word to genre. And thus are generated each

and all of the figures of eloquence in every human language.

Tetrads vivisect these transformations in exact

detail: New Science provides a common

foundation for rhetoric, linguistics, semantics,

hermeneutics, and semiotics.

In the process, four kinds of relations between tetrads - between their

subjects - wil l be discovered, as has already occurred with the tetrads on

other artefacts.

First, closed circles or rings of tetrads wil l appear, as, for exam pie, litotes

(understatement) is the reversal of hyperbole (overstatement) and vice

versa (see page 209).

Second, chains or sequences of tetrads appear. These can be generated

by any of the four processes, A will obsolesce B ; B wil l obsolesce c, c will

obsolesce D ; and so on Or, A wil l retrieve B ; B will retrieve c; and so on. Or

reversal, as wi th Newton's Three Laws (see pages 213-14).

Third, clusters of tetrads appear, revealing significant intersections in

the processes of their subjects. Thus, a group will be found, all of whose

members enhance, or obsolesce, and so on, the same thing Metaphor,

paradox, erotema (rhetorical question), and many other figures set aside

direct narrative statement All electric technologies extend the central

nervous system. Books and files reify memory (retrieval). Cubism and

atonality enhance multi locationalism and set aside a fixed, homogeneous

point of view.

Fourth, the subjects will give rise to several apparently quite different

tetrads. Metaphor, for example, can be stressed to flip into simile, or

metonymy, and so on, each wi th differences in other areas of the tetrad.

The same observation can be made wi th respect to tetrads in chapter four,

every one of them can give rise to two, or three, or more tetrads. The

question as to which is the right one is meaningless. Each tetrad is a

vivisection of its subject, and reveals its essential verbal nature and form.

Viewed in differing ways, as against different grounds, the artefact may

present different features as salient but their pattern from one 'fix' to

another wil l persist. Each of a group of tetrads on the same subject, then, is

a hologram that displays the same structure and configuration of physical

and psychic energies as the others: all should be considered simultaneously.

239 Media Poetics

Another traditional understanding of the figures of speech holds ma-

each is a unique posture of the mind and the imagination. Each is a vortex o?

energy and experience and a pattern of sensibility The goal of science and

the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not

the genetic but the perceptual code In a global information environment,

the old pattern of educavon in answer-ftnding is of no ava'J one is

surrounded by answers, millions of them H moving and mutating at electric

speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to

question in the proper way and place As the information that constitutes

the environment is perpetually m flux, so the need is not for f/xed concepts

but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an

ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of

this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides.

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Index of Tetrads

Tetrads, given in who le (boldface) or in part.

Acous t ic space 160-1

Archetype 100-4, 107

Airplane (2) 202-3 Aristotelian causal i ty 182-3

Aristotle 212

Booze 144

Brothel 135

Car 99, 107, 148 Cigarette 134

Cl iché 100-4, 107, 174-5

Clock 166-7

Compu te r 100, 188-9

Copern ican revolution 184-5

Copula (is) 236, 236n Credit card (2) 196-7

C rowd 146

Cub i sm 156^7

Data 107

Dialect ic 211

Digital w a t c h 106

Drugs 141

Eco logy 106

Ems temian space-t ime relativity 214

Electr ic light 194

Electr ic techno logy 106

E n h a n c e m e n t 227

Femin is t 210

Gramma r 211

He rmeneu t i c s 140

High-rise 138

Hyperbo le 209

252 Index of Tetrads

Impetus 212 Irony 235, 237 Is (copula) 236, 236n

Kinetic space 137

Law of effect 180-1 Law of the jungle 192-3 Law of new genetics 176-7 Litotes 209

Maslow's rule 178-9 Metaphor 120,126^8,225-6,235 Metonymy 236, 237 Microphone/PA system 143 Money 99 r 106, 107

Movie 106

New genetics 176-7 Newton's three laws 213-14 No-fault divorce 99

Number 173

Obsolescence 227

Perspective in painting 100r 132 Photograph 99

Pill, the 99

Pipe 133 Pollsters 168-9 Press 149 Print 100

Radio 172 Refrrgerator 139 Retrieval 228 Reversal 228 Rhetoric 211 Romanticism 100,(2)198-201

Satellite 150-1 Semeiotics 136 Slang 162-3 Spoken word 186-7 Stirrup 164-5 Suffragette 210 Symbolist poetry (3) 207 Synecdoche 236, 237

Tactile space 142 Telegraph press 170-1 Telephone 152-3 Television 158-9 Tetrad 224 Triads 225 Trivium, the 211

Vacuum cleaner 99, 108

Visual space (2) 204-5

Washing machine 190-1 Wine (2) 206 Written word 106 ,154-5

Xerox 145